Issues in RF IC design
(NTU Short Course)
The low-cost and small form factors associated with monolithic silicon
integrated circuits make semiconductor technologies particularly well
suited to meet the emerging demand for high volume transceiver components
required in portable consumer electronics for mobile communications.
The entire telecommunications industry is currently experiencing a
renaissance in the field of radio frequency circuit design. Modern
communication receivers will be highly integrated.
This presents a
particularly challenging set of design problems for industrial engineers
attempting to implement as many radio components on a single silicon
substrate while both standards and consumers are requiring ever more aggressive
radio performance.
This course is meant as a survey of recent advances
made in semiconductor technologies in the area of wireless radio frequency
circuit
design and fabrication with a particular emphasis on high integration
transceivers fabrication in a standard CMOS technology. An eight lecture
series begins with a review of the basic operation of a conventional
super-heterodyne transceiver system. This is followed with a discussion of
receiver sensitivity, noise figure, selectivity, blocking performance,
phase noise performance, and image-rejection. Two lectures are devoted to
an examination of the relative merits of new highly integrated radio
architectures which have been introduced within the last two years. One
lecture is devoted to the basic design techniques of integrated Phase
Locked Loops (PLLs),
while the last lecture covers some of the fundamental operation and design
issues of integrated CMOS Low Noise Amplifiers(LNA) and mixers.
Students enrolled in this course are assumed to have been exposed to a senior
level college analog integrated circuits course. This video lecture course
is offered through the Berkeley branch of the National Technological University,
better known as
CalVIEW. Engineers interested in purchasing the video tapes
should contact the CalVIEW director
Pam Atkinson.