Low cost signal source for multi-band multi-mode wireless systems

In multi-band multi-mode radio architectures, a number of local oscillator (LO) frequencies are required in order to process the information in various frequency bands. Since oscillators consume a substantial part of the chip area and battery power, this article describes the design approach of RCO (reconfigurable concurrent oscillator) that simultaneously generates generate multiple frequencies with the user having an option of choosing a frequency or combination of them that eliminate the need of lossy switches for switching the frequency band, thereby improves the throughput.