Renesas collaborates with IMEC on reconfigurable RF transceivers
(Product News, 29 Apr 2008 )
Renesas Technology has entered into a strategic research collaboration with IMEC, Europe's leading independent research center in the field of nanoelectronics, to perform research on 45nm RF transceivers targeting Gbit/s cognitive radios. To this end, Renesas has joined IMEC's software-defined radio (SDR) front-end program.
This research program includes reconfigurable RF solutions, high-speed/low-power analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) and new approaches to digitize future RF architectures.
Researchers from Renesas will reside at IMEC to closely collaborate with IMEC's research team. In this way, they will build a fundamental understanding and develop robust solutions for Renesas future mobile electronics products.
On the near term, IMEC's SDR-front-end program targets the development of a new generation cost-, performance- and power-competitive reconfigurable radio in 45nm digital CMOS technology. This radio will have a programmable center frequency from 100MHz to 6GHz and programmable bandwidth from 100kHz to 40MHz covering all key communication standards, with a merit comparable to state-of-the-art single mode transceivers.
The research program builds on IMEC's previous groundbreaking 130nm RF transceiver results (published at ISSCC 2007), namely the world's first prototype of a true SDR transceiver IC (SCALDIO). Also, further evolutions of IMEC's record breaking ADCs (merit record by IMEC at ISSCC 2008 of 40Msamples/s, 9 bit, 54fJ/conversion step) will be developed within this collaboration.
