Cellular Transceivers
Tony Montalvo, Aarno Pärssinen · 2008
Continued growth of the more than 1 -billion unitperyear cellular phone industry is driven in part by the continued cost reduction and miniaturization of the underlying technology. The remarkable evolution of cellular phone technology over the last two decades began with migration from Il-V technology to bipolar/BiCMOS silicon processes and continued with the development of direct-conversion and low-IF architectures that eliminate passive components not amenable to integration. In recent years architectures enabling implementations in pure digital CMOS processes have emerged. Once the radio is implemented in digital CMOS and non-integratable components are eliminated, the evident next step is to integrate the radio with the digital baseband. The papers in this session provide benchmarking results of the latest developments in this area. In particular, ICs addressing standards at two phases of the integration life cycle are presented. In the 3G/WCDMA world, elimimating SAW filters is the current challenge. GSM suppliers have reached the next phase and, in addition to integrating the digital baseband, include the applications processor.