The Rise of the Digital RFIC Era: An Overview of Past and Present Digital RFIC Advancements

It has been a mere 130 years since the first widely known wireless telegraphy apparatus was demonstrated by Guglielmo Marconi, transmitting radio signals to a distance of about 2.4 km. In today’s world, as illustrated by
Figure 1
, we are using a plethora of radios for an ever-increasing number of different applications. In fact, observing the data rate of wireless standards published by bodies like the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) and the Wi-Fi alliance
[1]
,
[2]
, shown in
Figure 1
, it can be readily seen that they increase by an order of magnitude every five years.