Future directions for RF IC design in silicon microelectronic technologies

Abstract form only given. The growth in mobile communication technology over the past decade has astonished the experts and exceeded almost all of our expectations. It has been driven fundamentally by innovations in radio architecture, circuit design and technology scaling as predicted by Moore´s Law. With current cellular phone sales exceeding one billion units per year and a projected market for mobile communication technology and services of greater than $1,000 billion by 2020, RF IC technology continues to drive innovations in data networking and personal connectivity. The milestones in radio frequency IC technology that have resulted in todays single-chip GSM radios are reviewed in the first part of this presentation. However, even as we look back and celebrate our success in establishing mobile telephony, constraints on RF IC performance imposed by deep submicron CMOS technology are dimming the prospects of developing truly scalable analog/RF circuits using conventional circuit topologies. Potential solutions to the design of adaptive, wideband and possibly scalable RF receiver front-ends will be described. Finally, some of the directions which current research work in millimetre-wave to ultrawideband and sensor networks for future RF IC applications are projected.