An Evolved GSM/EDGE Baseband ASIC Supporting Rx Diversity

In this paper, a baseband ASIC which supports receive diversity and soft-output Viterbi equalization for enhanced 2G networks is presented. It includes a transmitter and receiver with a symbol detector and a decoder with a dedicated incremental redundancy implementation, as well as the necessary control capability to autonomously communicate with the RF-IC. The ASIC is connected to an RF-IC to build a complete Evolved EDGE transceiver system. The transceiver system reaches a measured sensitivity close to -112 dBm for single-antenna GSM voice channels and achieves the reference interference performance for adjacent channels 11.4 dB above 3GPP requirements. It is the first reported solution which fulfills the most demanding 3GPP Downlink Advanced Receive Performance Phase 2 testcases specified for Rx-diversity. The ASIC occupies 6 mm ² in 130 nm CMOS with a power consumption between 3.9 and 14 mW.