A dynamic reconfigurable RF circuit architecture

Abstract

This paper proposes a dynamic reconfigurable architecture for analog RF circuits. The architecture consists of RF circuits and a control circuit. The RF circuits can be reconfigured by bias voltages of transistors and variable passive components, and the RF circuit block can also be switched dynamically. The proposed architecture can realize the multi-band/mode RF circuit in single chip for the Software Defined Radio, which achieves considerable reduction of circuit area and power consumption. On the other hand, we can obtain robust RF circuits by the dynamic reconfiguration for the process variation, the dynamic change of temperature, etc. I. IDigital circuits can achieve high performance according to the miniaturization of process technology. However, analog RF circuit design becomes difficult because of low supply voltage, design margin for device variations and operating temperature, etc. On the other hand, recent analog RF circuit requires more integration and multi-band/mode function by the development of radio communication technology [1, 2]. While single chip circuit can achieve high performance, miniaturization and low cost, the analog circuit design becomes more difficult. Furthermore, RF circuit performance is degraded by process variation, temperature at the runtime, simulation error, etc, which also contributes to make the RF circuit design difficult. It is an indispensable technology to reduce the design cost of RF circuits.For such a complicated analog RF circuit design, we propose reconfigurable RF circuit architecture [3]. The architecture can improve yield and design manufacturability of RF circuits by the corroboration of analog and digital circuits. The circuit performance can be dynamically controlled at the runtime by operating the bias voltages of transistors, variable devices and reconfigurable switches. For example, Fig.

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