Belgian research lab IMEC and Renesas have revealed a reconfigurable transceiver that eliminates the need of surface acoustic wave (SAW) filters.
The development is part of IMEC's Scaldio reconfigurable radio programme, and was presented at the International Solid-State Circuit Conference (ISSCC) in San Francisco this week.
"The transceiver is compatible with multiple wireless standards including the fourth generation mobile broadband standard 3GPP-LTE," said IMEC.
Reconfigurable radios allow a single transceiver to receive multiple communication standards.
"One of the major obstacles today in designing fully reconfigurable radios is making the antenna filters reconfigurable due to their stringent requirements. By making the Scaldio receiver highly linear, more out-of-band blocker interference can be allowed in the RF receiver, avoiding the need of SAW filters and consequently enabling a simplified antenna interface," said IMEC.
The fine geometry CMOS receiver has a 3dB noise figure and is capable of handling a 0dBm blocker at 20MHz offset.
"This is the highest blocker resilience for low noise figures," claimed the lab. "It also achieves the highest linearity: +10dBm IIP3, +70dBm IIP2, and frequency range reported up to now and handles blockers well in any mode."
The transmitter combines adaptive out-of-band noise filtering with voltage-sampling up-conversion to achieve RX band noise down to -162dBc/Hz, which also allows SAW-less operation.
"SAW-less transmitters become more and more important with the evolution towards future standards such as 3GPP-LTE where transmitters will need to operate in multiple FDD [frequency division duplex] bands," explained IMEC.
Both receiver and transmitter are said to be suitable for phones and other portables, as well as small-cell basestations.
"This accomplishment is an important step towards our integrated RF solution for next generation multimode wireless communication systems," said Yoshinobu Nakagome, manager of mixed signal core development at Renesas.