Patent ID: 7796956

Claim:
A front-end architecture for a receiver in a multi-antenna, multi-band radio in which a radio signal is received through a first antenna and a second antenna, and the received signal is processed through corresponding first and second receive chains, each receive chain including band-independent components that process signals equally well in different frequency bands and band-dependent components that are optimized for processing signals in specific frequency bands, wherein an improvement comprises: a first dedicated receive chain implemented prior to a baseband processor, for processing signals received by the first antenna, comprising: band-dependent components for the first frequency band only; and band-independent components; and a second dedicated receive chain implemented prior to the baseband processor, for processing signals received by the second antenna, comprising: band-dependent components for the second frequency band only; and band-independent components; means for applying a radio signal in the first frequency band to both the first and second dedicated receive chains; and a baseband processor for receiving processed outputs from the first and second dedicated receive chains and jointly processing the outputs wherein the radio signal is in the first frequency band and the signal from the first antenna is provided to in-band band-dependent components in the first dedicated receive chain, and the signal from the second antenna is provided to out-of-band band-dependent components in the second dedicated receive chain, thereby producing a first signal of good quality and a second signal of poor quality, wherein the baseband processor includes means for jointly processing the good quality signal and the poor quality signal utilizing interference rejection combining (IRC)-type processing to produce a very good quality signal.