RF Integrated Circuit Design
With the recent explosive growth of the Telecommunications industry, research in this field has taken on critical importance. The major issues being investigated are higher levels of integration, lower power designs, and lower cost solutions. These issues are being addressed in a number of ways, and with several different technologies. Current research is in the area of design of Mixers, Power Amplifiers (PAs), Low Noise Amplifiers (LNAs), Frequency Synthesizers, Intermediate Frequency circuits (IF), and Baseband circuits.
To meet the ever-increasing consumer demand for portable low-cost, low-power transceivers used in
PCS, cordless and cellular telephone applications we are investigating highly integrated transceiver
solutions. To address the integration issue we are exploring receiver and transmit path architectures
that facilate integration of all transceiver blocks on a single silicon substrate. In addition, we
seek to develop a radio system that is somewhat generic allowing a single radio to be utilized by
multiple RF standards. An example application might be a portable phone with a single transceiver
allowing the user to us both a cordless and cellular network for communication. On the circuit
level, we are developing solutions that allow the integration of the higher frequency blocks
like the LNA and mixer in a standard low-cost CMOS process also leaving the possibility of
integrating all the analog blocks with the digital backend.
The multi-standard transceiver project was initiated with a single chip CMOS receiver designed
to meet the specifications of the Digital Enhanced Cordless Telecommunications (DECT) standard.
This device was fabricated and tested throughout 1996. Currently, we are designing a single-chip
transceiver for the GSM standard which is schedule to tapeout in early 1998.
Monolithic CMOS RF Transceiver
Monolithic Mixer Design
Integrated Power Amplifier Design
RF Device Modeling
Back to the Analog IC Group page.
Bugs and suggestions to
webmaster@kabuki.eecs.berkeley.edu
Last modified: Tue Sep 10 01:06:18 1996