Single chip radio solutions for wireless communication - Session 18

Abstract

The market trend towards wireless communication systems continues. More and more communication devices employ wireless technology, where previously wired technologies were common. Cellular communication systems, wireless local area and personal area networks provide connectivity in the office, to the mobile user, and at home. Modern semiconductor process technology is a key enabling factor for the realization of highly integrated radio systems and low cost solutions, which are needed to meet market and consumer requirements. In this session five papers will be presented, which give examples for how advanced process and design techniques have been applied to achieve this objective. Bluetooth has become a popular technology for short range communication mainly in mobile phones, but also in personal digital assistants. It operates in the 2.4 GHz ISM band. Low power consumption and high level of integration are critical requirements in these applications. The first paper presents a design technique that leads to a Bluetooth RF transceiver, which can operate from a 1V supply voltage. Details are given on every block of the CMOS design and the silicon on insulator (SOI) technology used to achieve low power operation. Wireless sensor networks have drawn the attention of the circuit design community because of their extreme requirements on the power consumption of the associated radio subsystem. In the second paper researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, provide insights in how they achieved a power consumption of less than 1.3 mW by carefully designing their system, the architecture of the 900 MHz radio subsystem itself, and making the right choices in the design of the circuit. The third paper provides a solution on how to address the cost issues in the demanding market for high speed wireless LAN solutions according to IEEE 802.1 1 b/g standard. A reconfigurable radio architecture in this single-chip radio design for 2.4 GHz operation provides loopback paths, which allow the digital signal processing in the baseband processor to measure and correct the imperfections of the radio transceiver subsystem. In this way process tolerances can be compensated for, which increases yield in production and performance of the device in the field. The next paper addresses a different kind of problem in transceiver design namely the challenge of dual band operation, when building an 802.1 1 a/b/g wireless LAN multi-standard solution. The 0.18 pm CMOS solution presented implements a direct conversion transceiver architecture with separate RF frontends to support 2.4 GHz …