System design considerations for next generation wireless mobile devices

During the last few years there has been an explosive growth in demand for smartphones with increasing capabilities and performance. With this demand come many associated hardware challenges. Power consumption is perhaps the foremost challenge. There are ever-increasing processing power requirements and an increasing number of computer cores. Many of the new capabilities require that some circuitry be “always-on” and “always-aware.” Higher data rates demand wider bandwidth baseband circuits, faster Digital Signal Processor (DSP) engines and increased peak-to-average ratios of the transmitted waveforms. Increased system capacity and global demand require an increasing number of frequency bands. This leads to a proportional increase in the overall RF front-end size and cost. Achieving the system capacity needed in the future will require dense deployment of femtocells to distribute traffic close to the user terminals. There will be an increased use of higher frequencies which will require >5 GHz design, modeling, packaging and test.