The main objectives of the project were to develop low-power and low-voltage key RF blocks for highly integrated personal communication terminals and to derive a design methodology for RF blocks in CMOS technology. This Design Experiment was aiming at advanced architecture and circuit design to allow single chip integration of the baseband and RF section in CMOS technology for 2nd and 3rd Generation Mobile and Wireless Systems using the 900 MHz and 2 GHz bands. The main areas of application for the developed circuits are for example the UMTS (W-CDMA, TD-CDMA), GSM, DECT and FLEX or REFLEX paging standards as well as Bluetooth.
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 were developed in three stages, namely system level, block level and component level, and are designed to serve as electronic building blocks in real products in wireless and mobile communications applications. Furthermore, the CMOS technology with RF enhancement 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 low-noise amplifiers (LNA), downconverter mixers & phase shifters, oscillators and frequency synthesisers, integrated filters, delta sigma converters, power amplifiers, etc.
· Development of novel models with RF features for active and passive devices as well as fine tuning and validation based on silicon integration;
· Analysis and trade-off of various architectures to make feasible single-chip implementation in particular with potential low-power consumption;
· Individual block design, simulation and comparison with silicon prototypes;
· System validation based on a dedicated demonstrator;
· Dissemination of results in co-operation with DIMES (TU Delft) in the frame of the TARDIS project.
Results
28 deliverable documents, discribing the approach followed, the realized demonstrator and the findings, are available on the Internet (http://www.ddtc.dimes.tudelft.nl/ESD-LPD/) The EKV Model of the MOST with RF features, developed in the project, can be found in the Web site
http://legwww.epfl.ch/ekv.