K-1 The RF-CMOS story: From university research to industry mainstream

Little did we know in 1994 that the early stirrings of interest to push easily-accessible CMOS multiproject chips to RF applications would lead, ten years later, to a new way of realizing RF microelectronics. Today RF-CMOS is the mainstream, high volume production technology for single-chip radios in cellphones and wireless LANs. It is proving to be more than a cheap replacement for BiCMOS: the intimate merging of RF, analog and digital, and some unique features of CMOS such as analog discrete-time signal processing is giving rise to entirely new paradigms such as software-defined radio. This talk will give an overview of the development of RF-CMOS from its beginnings to date, and a glance on the possibilities ahead.