Green radios
Cognitive radio
A revolution in flexibility, intelligence, and connectivity
Building on imec’s expertise
Imec’s research program on software-defined radios (SDR) has led to a world recognized expertise and a first generation of SDR solutions. The program’s focus was on battery-powered terminals, resulting in low-power solutions.
- a flexible RF transceiver front-end
- a programmable high-throughput baseband platform
- scalable and low-power data converter circuits
- a system design environment
- software solutions for data processing on SDR platforms
Addressing the design challenges for the next generation
Seamless connectivity
Ubiquitous and seamless connectivity can be achieved in a heterogeneous network, if both the terminals and the network can be reconfigured to support horizontal roaming (between access points following one standard) and vertical roaming (between access points operating under different standards). This calls for technological answers that support seamless connectivity, at a low cost and with a high flexibility, using reconfigurable radios.
Reconfigurable radio platforms for 4G in ≤ 40nm CMOS target more concurrent streams, higher rates and flexibility, at low cost and power.
Imec’s reconfigurable radio front-end research focuses on scalable transceivers in cost-effective digital CMOS technology, targeting low power, low cost, high linearity and multimode–operation. In addition, digital RF and surface acoustic wave (SAW)-less transceivers are being investigated.
Imec’s reconfigurable baseband research focuses on scalable, low-cost, low-power platforms that can be instantiated for multiple sets of standards and that include sensing solutions, multiprocessors for concurrent multistream baseband processing and flexible error coding.
Spectrum sensing for cognitive radios
Imec is developing a spectrum sensing engine that analyzes the frequency band occupation. Our solution includes novel signal processing algorithms that trade-off processing cost and sensing reliability, as function of the spectrum use scenario. In parallel, imec looks at radio architectures that allow sensing multiple channels in parallel while having flexibility in tuning the center frequency.
The goal of this exercise is to achieve real cognitive radios. Radios that sense and learn from the environment to autonomously adapt their transmission parameters, with a receiver able to scan a wide frequency range, searching for optimal transmit opportunities.