"Software-radio base-stations, a challenge for analog IC-design"

This paper discusses the impact and aspects on analog IC for wideband radio systems and in particular software defined radio. The strong evolution of digital ASIC´s and signal processing cause analog IC and dataconverters to be bottlenecks of future radio systems. Signal dynamic range and linearity of dataconverters, frequency converters and power amplifiers are already today a great challenge. The handling of this challenge is discussed in terms of process evolution, the importance of understanding technology limitations, the impact of design experience and the advantage of understanding the RF-design language. To exemplify the challenge, solutions of converter circuits and complex control circuitry for RF-frequencies are presented.