| Posted: February 9, 2009 |
IMEC presents 45nm single-chip reconfigurable receiver for digital radio |
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(Nanowerk News) With the launch of its
single-chip reconfigurable receiver achieving industry state-of-the-art
performance, IMEC matures its flexible radios in deep sub-micron digital
CMOS to ease the implementation of both the analog and the digital
functionality into the same system-on-chip (SoC). The architecture
optimally benefits from the speed advantages of chip technology scaling
resulting in low cost, low power radios. In parallel, IMEC is working on
digitally inspired flexible radios ultimately targeting a true software
radio.
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At today's International Solid State Circuit Conference, IMEC presented its
45nm single-chip reconfigurable receiver with power, performance and area
competitive to state-of-the-art single mode radios. The receiver is fully
software configurable across all channels in the frequency bands between
100MHz and 5GHz. The IC uses only 1.1V supply voltage and has an active
area of 2mm (squared). Depending on its configuration it consumes from 54
to 105mA.
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| IMEC’s fully reconfigurable flexible receiver
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The radio can be configured for multiple state-of-the-art and
future wireless protocols such as GSM, GPS, EDGE, WCDMA, HSDPA, CDMA2K,
EVDO, LTE, 802.11ab/gn, DVB-H and 802.16d/e. Its high level of integration
and ultra-low power consumption make it suitable for use in a wide range of
both single and multi-mode mobile devices - handsets, smart phones, PDAs,
PC cards, USB dongles, etc.
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The complete transceiver will be taped out in April 2009. Industry can get
a head start for their mobile devices of 2011, by joining IMEC's
reconfigurable radio research program in which they get access to the
technology and build up early knowhow on the transceiver.
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At ISSCC2009, IMEC also presented a new architecture for a multi-mode
multi-rate cascade sigma-delta low-pass analog to digital convertor (ADC)
in 90nm digital CMOS. The ADC achieves a dynamic range of 85 to 66dB for
GSM, Bluetooth and UMTS with power consumption of only 3.4 to 6.8mW showing
the intrinsic power efficiency of the architecture without specific circuit
optimization.
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"This achievement indicates the move to more digitally-inspired flexible
radios," said Rudy Lauwereins, vice-president of smart systems technology
office at IMEC. "Step by step we are removing scaling unfriendly analog
building blocks and replacing them by digital implementations making the
radio even more flexible."
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Going one step further IMEC also reports a prototype RF band-pass
sigma-delta ADC with a bandwidth of 60MHZ at 2.4GHz. With this
architecture, ultimately, the analog to digital conversion would be placed
at the antenna shifting all signal conditioning to the digital domain.
"Currently the performance is not yet sufficient but we have a clear
roadmap towards the dream of digital software radios," said Rudy
Lauwereins.
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