Amir Hadji-Abdolhamid

A multistandard, multiband SoC with integrated BT, FM, WLAN radios and integrated power amplifier

The growing occurrences of WLAN, BT, and FM on the same mobile device have created a demand for putting all three on the same die to save on die size, I/O count, BOM, and ultimately cost. Common blocks such as crystal oscillator, bandgap, and power management units can be easily shared. This paper presents a solution in which 802.11a/b/g WLAN, single-stream 11n (SSN) WLAN, BT, and FM subsystem and radio are integrated on a single die.

A Quad-Band GSM/GPRS/EDGE SoC in 65 nm CMOS

A quad-band 2.5G SoC integrating all the RF, DSP, ARM, audio and other baseband processing functions into a single 65 nm CMOS die is described. The paper focuses on the radio portion mostly, and addresses the challenges of realizing a complete GSM/EDGE SoC with the RF integrated along with the rest of digital baseband circuitry. Several circuit level as well as architectural techniques are presented to realize a very low-cost and low-power 2.5G radio while meeting the stringent cellular requirements with wide margin. The radio draws a battery current of 49 mA in the receiver-mode, and 86/77 mA in the GMSK/8PSK transmit-mode. The low-IF receiver achieves a sensitivity of -110 dBm at the antenna, corresponding to a noise figure of 2.4 dB at the device input. The 8PSK±400 kHz modulation mask is - 64.1/62.7 dBc for high/low bands, with an RMS EVM of 2.45/1.95%. The radio core area is 3.95 mm2 .

A 13.5mA sub-2.5dB NF multi-band receiver

An ultra low-power multi-band receiver covering any frequency band in the range 0.7-2.5GHz is fabricated in 40nm CMOS and occupies a total area of 1.5mm2. The receiver achieves a NF of 2.4dB, with -2dBm IIP3, and a peak SNR of 35dB, while consuming 13.5mA from the battery, more than three times power reduction compared to prior art.

Transmitter development for cellular integrated circuits

This article reviews transmitter topologies for radio transceivers with emphasis on cellular applications. In the first section it discusses different architectures and the challenges in practical implementations. Then it presents a transmitter as part of a fully integrated transceiver for GSM/GPRS/EDGE.