Radio transceiver architectures and design issues for wideband cellular systems

As the era of content driven and rich multimedia mobile applications evolves, the need arises for efficient wideband cellular systems. This paper presents modern radio transceiver architectures used in 3G cellular handsets, such as EDGE, cdma2000, and WCDMA/HSDPA. This includes future ΣΔ-ADC based receiver and mostly all-digital transmitter architectures, which are being enabled by the current aggressive scaling of CMOS technology and the push toward full radio system-on-chip (SoC) integration. Furthermore, the paper focuses on discussing some key RF system design issues, and their influence on the choice of architecture used for a specific cellular radio-chipset solution.