Towards a Coherent Framework for Automated RF Front-End Design Using Hardware Abstraction

Although RF front ends represent a very important part in communication equipments, relatively small efforts have been made in order to automate their design process and, consequently, their hardware abstraction. By contrast, baseband designers routinely make use of hardware abstraction tools and techniques and use synthesis approaches to generate complex functionalities on various hardware platforms saving time and money in the process. To bridge this gap between the baseband and RF, a framework for the RF design cycle that incorporates functional description and hardware abstraction with circuit synthesis in an automated process is needed. In this paper, we propose such a framework and outline its main building blocks. The key concept in the proposed framework is a new unified matrix representation of the electrical behavior of RF components, dubbed the Q-matrix. The foundations and details of this Q-matrix representation are presented.