Topics in integrated circuits for communications

In the last decade, most research efforts in the communications industry have focused on systems with bit rates of 0.3 Mb/s??100 Mb/s over a radio frequency range of 100 Mhz??5 GHz. These systems include second-/third-/fourthgeneration (2G/3G/4G) cellular, Bluetooth, and wireless LAN (WLAN) technologies for mobile phones and portable computers. With an explosive increase of data content delivered to mobile devices, there is an urgent need to further increase the throughput of such mobile networks at least tenfold. Although recent wireless standards, such as IEEE 802.11n, have been developed in an attempt to address such a need, they do not offer gigabitsper- second throughput. One reason for the limit in throughput is due to the scarcity of available bandwidth in the low gigahertz frequency spectrum. Consequently, many emerging gigabits-per-second wireless systems are exploiting the use of millimeter wave (mm-wave) or even submm- wave range.