Towards the fully integration of wireless front-end circuits in deep-submicron technologies

Since several years the research in the possibilities of CMOS technologies for RF applications is growing enormously. The trend towards deep sub-micron technologies allows the operation frequency of CMOS circuits above 1GHz, which opens the way to integrated CMOS RF circuits. Several research groups have developed high performance down-converters, low phase noise voltage controlled oscillators and dual modulus prescalers in standard CMOS technologies. The research has already demonstrated fully integrated receivers and synthesizers with no external components, nor tuning or trimming. Further research on low noise amplifiers, power amplifiers, synthesisers has recently resulted in fully integrated CMOS RF transceivers for DCS-1800 and Bluetooth applications.