RF CMOS SoC Architectures and Building Blocks

RF CMOS technologies have proven to be the critical path to the ever-integrated solutions in the wireless communications applications ranging from cellular technologies to consumer applications (Bonnaud et al., 2006 and Vassiliou et al., 2006). Advancements both in innovative radio architectures and rich CMOS IC designs made the system-on-chip (SoC) commercial products widely possible. This paper will discuss CMOS prevalent wireless RFIC architectures. In doing so, what the challenges are for the RFIC building blocks in realizing the SoC design. As a design example, a critical building block used in Comlent's TD-SCDMA transceiver has been demonstrated