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Summary

The main objectives of the project are to develop low power and low voltage key RF blocks for highly integrated personal communication terminals and to derive a design methodology for such RF blocks based on the used CMOS technology. This Design Experiment is aimed on advanced architecture and circuit design to allow single chip integration of the base-band and RF section in CMOS technology for 2^nd and 3^rd Generation Mobile and Wireless Systems using the 900MHz and 2GHz band. The main areas of application for the developed circuits are for example the UMTS (W-CDMA, TD-CDMA), GSM, DECT and FLEX paging standards.

By designing, building and testing functional silicon prototypes, enhanced technologies for manufacture and assembly are to be developed in the field of advanced low power CMOS circuits. The prototypes are developed in three steps, component level, block level and system level, and are designed to serve as electronic building blocks in real products in wireless and mobile communications applications. Furthermore, the technology is considered to be suitable for the design of subsystems in the market segments of consumer products, automotive and other industrial applications.

Objectives

Advanced CMOS RF circuit design including blocks such as LNA, downconverter mixers & phase shifters, oscillator and frequency synthesiser, integrated filters, delta sigma conversion, power amplifier, etc.

Development of novel models for active and passive devices as well as fine tuning and validation based on first silicon fabricates;

Analysis and specification of sophisticated architectures to meet in particular low power single chip implementation ;

Individual block design, simulation, and evaluation against silicon prototypes;

Exhaustive system validation based on a complete prototype for a dedicated system;

Functional prototypes based on applications for wireless and mobile communications.

Participants

CSEM (CH), SGS-Thomson (F), CNET (F), Univerity Pavia (IT), EPFL (CH)

Design Story

Public Deliverables