Towards the Full Integration of Wireless Front-End Circuits in Deep-Submicron Technologies

Abstract

Research into the potentials of CMOS technologies for RF applications has been growing enormously in the past few years. The trend towards deep sub-micron technologies allows operation frequencies of CMOS circuits above 1 GHz, which opens the way to integrated CMOS RF circuits. Several research groups have developed high performance down-converters, low phase noise voltage-controlled oscillators and dualmodulus pre-scalers in standard CMOS technologies. Research has already resulted in fully integrated receivers and VCO circuits with no external components, neither tuning nor trimming. Further research on low noise amplifiers, up-converters and synthesisers has recently resulted in fully integrated CMOS RF transceivers for DCS-1800 applications.