Fully-integrated CMOS RF transceivers

The market for cellular wireless handsets demands very high levels of sophistication and also low component cost and power. In addition to wide-area network interfaces such as GPRS, EDGE, and WCDMA, wireless connectivity features such as GPS, Bluetooth, WLAN, and mobile digital TV are now becoming commonplace. This has driven the demand for many air interfaces to be supported in a single handset design. Conventional silicon integration, employing separate digital baseband, analog, and RF components for each air interface would result in far too many components for an efficient integration. As a result, CMOS SOC devices that integrate all of these functions into single-chip components have become increasingly popular. This paper explains the motivation and challenges of SOC integration in deep submicron CMOS. Examples of SOC devices are provided along with experimental results.