Evolutional Trend of Mixed Analog and Digital RF Circuits

Abstract

This paper describes recent technology trend of mixed analog digital RF circuits. With the progress of CMOS technology, large-scale digital signal process and control function can be integrated in an RF integrated circuit and some analog signal process blocks can be translated to digital signal processing units. At the same time, the design of remaining analog functional blocks becomes very hard. In this paper, those integration techniques for receiver and transmitter in these 20 years are reviewed. As a typical example of digital assisted systems, synthesizer based transmitters are discussed in detail.