The Challenges for analog circuit design in Mobile radio VLSI chips

Abstract

Mobile radio telephony is becoming a driving application for analog circuit design and silicon CMOS and RF bipolar technology. New telecom systems like GSM, PCN, DECT, Wireless in the loop ... are all developing very rapidly and will enable us very soon to organise a complete telephone network with full coverage for your mobile car phone, as well as in your kitchen and on your office desk. In Europe the major telecom companies have worked together to establish one common standard for cellular mobile radio communications at 900MHz. Similar things are happening for other wireless personal communication systems. Basically the cellular radio telephone, the wireless PABX and the wireless SLIC are bringing the same challenges to analog circuit design: maximum integration of the basic radio functions into 1 or 2 silicon chips, CMOS, Bipolar or BICMOS or GaAs.

The analog circuit designer for radio telephone applications will need all the state of the art analog design know how available today, from RF—mixers and GHz range low noise amplifiers and local oscillator synthesizers over base band 100kHz CMOS analog to low frequency speech analog to digital conversion. And for all these circuits the message is: minimum power consumption for battery autonomy, minimum silicon area for maximum functional integration per die to obtain a small, low cost pocket size radio telephone.