Technology transfer and license agreements
Green radio IP blocks
Imec’s flexible RF front-end (Scaldio) consists of a single-chip reconfigurable frequency synthesizer and receiver in 45nm-CMOS-technology. The 45nm-single-chip flexible receiver is fully software configurable across all channels in the frequency bands between 100MHz and 5GHz. Its properties (such as the RF carrier frequency, channel bandwidth, noise figure, linearity, filter characteristic) can be adapted to the requirements of the standards that are used.
The receiver is characterized by a very low power consumption and an extremely small chip area of only 2mm². It combines high sensitivities for cellular standards, low phase noise, and high linearity for the inter-modulation test in DVB-H mode. All these targets are achieved by optimizing both the overall receiver architecture and the individual building blocks to exploit the speed capabilities of the scaled digital technology while minimizing the total area occupied by passive devices. Therefore, it is competitive to state-of-the-art single mode radios in mobile devices – handsets, smart phones, PDAs, PC cards, USB dongles, etc.