n the noise of the ADC will have only culation of the receiver. limited effects in overall performance. If, however, the The largest signal is determined by the fullscale of ADC was designed to dominate overall noise or guarding of much less than 10 dB was used between the two, the the ADC and the applied conversion gain. Similarly, the effects on the overall receiver performance should be smallest signal to be detected can be calculated by revisited to determine the effects of ADC noise versus the noise in the channel of interest. The maximum detectable signal before clipping is determined by: a variety of signal conditions [11]. XDS = PADC_Fullscale - G (2.3.3) IF Selection/tradeoffs The minimum detectable signal is determined by: Selecting an IF frequency for a traditional single-carrier receiver can be challenging enough. However, in a MDS = 10 log 0.001 BW signal + cascaded_total multi-carrier receiver, traditional issues such as determining the level of the high-order intermodulation products of all signals is complicated by the fact that now + required (2.3.4) entire bands are being translated from one frequency to For example, if the ADC has a fullscale of +4 dBm another. This problem is further complicated by aliasing and the conversion gain is 35 dB, the maximum input within the ADC. In a typical single-carrier receiver, the power is -31 dBm. Similarly, if the channel of interest is IF signal into the ADC is chosen such that any aliased 200 kHz wide, the total NF is 3 dB and the required SNR harmonics of the input signal fall away from the input is 5 dB, then the MDS is -112.8 dBm. Taking the dif- signal. This is important at low signal levels because when ference between Equations (2.3.3) and (2.3.4) will esti- an ADC is stimulated by very low-level inputs, it is mate the dynamic range of the receiver. In this example, possible that spurious responses generated within the the signal dynamic range is found to be 82 dB: ADC can be larger than the desired input. Thus if the harmonics are designed to fall 