See also: Our roundup of the latest news from the IEEE ISSCC (International Solid State Circuits Conference), San Francisco
At the International Solid-State Circuits Conference in San Francisco this week Belgian research lab IMEC revealed a receiver chip that can handle just about every mobile phone standard.
"The receiver is fully software configurable across all channels in the frequency bands between 100MHz and 5GHz," said IMEC. "The radio can be configured for multiple wireless protocols such as GSM, GPS, EDGE, WCDMA, HSDPA, CDMA2000, EVDO, LTE, 802.11ab/gn, DVB-H and 802.16d/e."
Aimed at single and multi-mode mobile devices, PC cards and USB dongles, the 45nm IC has an active area of 2mm[super2], runs from 1.1V, and consumes from 54 to 105mA depending on mode.
The complete transceiver will be taped out in April. "Industry can get a head start for their mobile devices of 2011, by joining IMEC's reconfigurable radio research program in which they get access to the technology and build up early know-how on the transceiver," said IMEC.
The lab also presented an architecture for a multi-mode multi-rate cascade sigma-delta low-pass ADC in 90nm digital CMOS which achieves a dynamic range of 85 to 66dB for GSM, Bluetooth and UMTS with power consumption of only 3.4 to 6.8mW.
"Step by step we are removing scaling unfriendly analogue building blocks and replacing them by digital implementations making the radio even more flexible," said Rudy Lauwereins, v-p at IMEC's smart systems technology office.
A further development at IMEC is an ADC so fast that it could eventually be connected straight to an aerial. The RF band-pass sigma-delta ADC has a bandwidth of 60MHZ at 2.4GHz. "Currently the performance is not yet sufficient but we have a clear roadmap towards the dream of digital software radios," said Lauwereins.
