IMEC and its spin-off mixed-signal chip consultancy AnSem are to offer wireless chip design services.
"The joint offering is targeted at companies that want to integrate IMEC's research results, and choose to outsource the design and customised development of their communication ICs," said IMEC. "The technology that is offered includes IMEC's first generation of flexible radio's reconfigurable transceivers, that can be tuned to operate with all present and future cellular, WLAN, WPAN, broadcast, and positioning standards."
In IMEC's first generation of flexible radios, all parameters are reconfigurable, including RF carrier frequency, channel bandwidth, noise figure, linearity and filter characteristic.
"This allows us to tune the performance and power consumption to the specific requirement of any application, such as satellite and terrestrial TV broadcast systems, navigation systems, mobile phones, or wireless access points," claimed IMEC.
On offer are single-standard implementations, in which the front-end transceiver spans a single-channel bandwidth in a single-frequency band, and multi-standard or multi-mode designs, spanning multiple-channel bandwidths or multiple-frequency bands.
The reconfigurable front-end IC in 130nm technology runs on 1.2V and has an active area of 7.7mm². Consumption ranges from 60 to 120mA depending on its configuration.