Analog Front-End Design for Mobile and Multimedia SoC

Increasingly, SoCs that follow the trend are at the center of mobile communications and wireless connectivity applications in smartphones or tablets, as well as other multimedia applications in the home such as digital TVs and set-top-boxes. The SoCs digitally process modulated analog signals that can be the output of wireless radios, wireline transceivers, or sensors connecting to the physical worlds. These signals must be accurately digitized for internal processing by baseband or application processors in the SoCs through the analog front-ends (AFEs) which are mainly constituted by the analog signal conditioning circuitries and data converters. Typically, the AFE components are specified in terms of their electrical characteristics, whereas the system designer evaluates the system performance with a different set of metrics. Therefore, system designers must interpret the AFE components' electrical specifications and how they determine the overall performance in units that are meaningful to the system.