PhD
Smart Systems and Energy Technology
Analog and RF circuit design for 45nm CMOS Cognitive Radio transceivers
Future handheld telecom systems will become cognitive, such that they can sense the environment, and based on that information optimize overall communication quality in terms of data rate, speech/video quality, and battery life. Therefore an extremely reconfigurable transceiver must be developed that can handle all communication standards that operate at frequencies ranging from hundreds of MHz up to 10GHz. For cost reasons the analog radio part of a telecom system for mass-market applications is preferably put on the same IC as the digital part, and hence uses the most advanced CMOS process, which currently is the 45nm node. The design of high-performance analog and RF circuits in digital-oriented nanometer CMOS is a big challenge.
In this PhD team these two challenges are tackled by investigating novel analog/RF circuit architectures in agressively scaled digital CMOS, simultaneously with wireless system and architecture development for extreme reconfigurability with state-of-the-art power/area/noise performance.
Responsible scientists: Jan Craninckx, Piet Wambacq, Liesbet Van der Perre