At today's International Solid State Circuit Conference, imec
and its research partners Renesas Technology Corp. and M4S present a complete
transceiver with RF, baseband and data converter circuits in 40nm low-power
CMOS. The fully reconfigurable transceiver is compatible with various wireless
standards and applications, including the upcoming mobile broadband 3GPP-LTE
standard.
Test board of the single-chip reconfigurable multi-standard wireless transceiver in 40nm CMOS developed by imec, Renesas and M4S.
The trend in wireless communication where terminals give their users ubiquitous
access to a multitude of services drives the development of reconfigurable radios
in deep-submicron CMOS. This is enhanced with the advent of 3GPP-LTE, a standard
that is inherently so flexible that a reconfigurable radio is its most economical
implementation. The single-chip reconfigurable transceiver developed by imec,
Renesas and M4S provides an answer to this need.
The flexible receiver, including analog-to-digital converter, is fully software
configurable across all channels in the frequency bands between 100MHz and 6GHz.
Its properties such as the RF carrier frequency, channel bandwidth, noise figure,
linearity and filter characteristics can be adapted to the requirements of the
communication standard that is used. It combines high sensitivities with low
phase noise and high linearity. These can be traded for lower power consumption
depending on the needs of a particular standard. The flexible transmitter reaches
low out-of-band noise, targeting SAW-less 3GPP-LTE operation. The transceiver
integrates this multi-standard programmability in an extremely small chip area
of only 5mm2 while achieving state-of-the-art performance and power consumption
for each covered standard. Therefore, it is competitive to recent single mode
radios in mobile devices – handsets, smart phones, PDAs, PC cards, USB
dongles, etc.
In a next phase of imec's ‘green radio' research program,
the focus will be on further reducing the bill of materials and energy consumption
by continuing the research on digitally-inspired SAW-less transceivers and power
efficient transmitters.
“We are excited that together with our reconfigurable radio program partners
Renesas and M4S, we have reached this great achievement with the conception
of a low-cost, low-power reconfigurable transceiver for next-generation mobile
broadband communications;” said Liesbet Van der Perre, director green
radios program at imec. “We are looking forward to continue the collaboration
towards next generation wireless.”
“It gives us great pleasure to have helped achieve one of the important
milestones of imec's research program by developing an innovative reconfigurable
RF transceiver that uses state-of-the-art CMOS technology;” said Yoshinobu
Nakagome, general manager of Advanced Analog Technology Div. Design and Development
Unit at Renesas Technology Corp. “This accomplishment bolsters our efforts
to develop new RF products that support multiple communication standards, including
3GPP-LTE.”
“We are proud to have contributed to imec's outstanding “green
radio program” and more specifically to the reconfigurable RF transceiver
R&D. The device presented today is an excellent Proof-of-Concept device,
clearly demonstrating the potential of several innovative 40nm CMOS RF circuit
concepts that where invented at Imec.” said Ivo Vandeweerd, CEO of M4S.
“Some of these inventions have contributed to the competitiveness of our
RF products, which we believe are the smallest, lowest power consuming, multi-mode
(2G/3G/LTE), commercial RF transceivers in the world. We are looking forward
to continue our collaboration with imec, seeding our internal R&D to stay
at the leading edge of innovation.”