Jongwoo Lee

A reconfigurable analog baseband for single-chip, Saw-less, 2G/3G/4G cellular transceivers with carrier aggregation

This paper describes an analog baseband for single-chip 2G/3G/4G MIMO transceivers. By capacitor sharing technique and log tuning, the RX filter is programmable to set fc from 0.1 to 14MHz with 2% accuracy with 93dB gain range which is linear-in-dB. The TX filter suppresses DAC images and noise for Saw-less with constant or ramping envelope. A digital calibration adjusts fc, Q, and DC offset. The filter implemented in 65nm CMOS, occupies 2.79mm2, and consumes 7.3/8.4/10.2mW with 1.2V supply for 2G/3G/4G, respectively. This chip is in mass production for handheld products.

A 12-b, 1-GS/s 6.1 mW current-steering DAC in 14 nm FinFET with 80 dB SFDR for 2G/3G/4G cellular application

A 14nm FinFET CMOS 12-b current-steering digital-to-analog (DAC) for 2G/3G/4G cellular applications is presented. A bit segmentation of 6-bit thermometer and 6-bit binary is adopted, and it utilizes the dynamic element matching (DEM) technique to suppress the spurious tones caused by the current source mismatches in 3-D FinFETs. In addition, to keep the voltage drop across each transistor within long-term reliability limit, output switches are designed with shielding transistors while achieving make-before-break operation with the proposed low crossing point level shifter. The active area of a single DAC is 0.036 mm2, and its power consumption is 6.1 mW with SFDR of 80 dBc.

What is a good way to expand a silicon value to a solution value

The market sizes of each IoT application are relatively smaller than the PC and smartphone, although the development and production cost of the LSIs are becoming high. The LSI designers should find the ways to get funding of their development. One way is to get funding from providing system solution or service applications with expanding business models from supplying devices, as well as reducing the LSI costs and making the production volume larger. The pressure to expand the device supplying model depends on each application market, so such status of each application is to be discussed and also whether the expansion of the model is really necessary and practical or not.