MMICs for mobile/personal communications applications

The demand for mobile and personal communications systems is expected to produce a huge market for handy phone sets and their MMICs in the coming years. A number of ICs in silicon bipolar, silicon Bi-CMOS, GaAs MESFET, HBT, and HEMT technology are now becoming available for system application. There are tradeoffs among the competing technologies with regard to performance, cost, reliability, and time-to-market. This paper describes process selection and requirements of cost and RF performance to MMICs for digital cellular and cordless telephones. Furthermore, new circuit techniques which were developed by NTT are presented.