(NTU Short Course)

The low-cost and small form factors associated with monolithic silicon integrated circuits make semiconductor technologies particularly well suited to meet the emerging demand for high volume transceiver components required in portable consumer electronics for mobile communications. The entire telecommunications industry is currently experiencing a renaissance in the field of radio frequency circuit design. Modern communication receivers will be highly integrated. This presents a particularly challenging set of design problems for industrial engineers attempting to implement as many radio components on a single silicon substrate while both standards and consumers are requiring ever more aggressive radio performance. This course is meant as a survey of recent advances made in semiconductor technologies in the area of wireless radio frequency circuit design and fabrication with a particular emphasis on high integration transceivers fabrication in a standard CMOS technology. An eight lecture series begins with a review of the basic operation of a conventional super-heterodyne transceiver system. This is followed with a discussion of receiver sensitivity, noise figure, selectivity, blocking performance, phase noise performance, and image-rejection. Two lectures are devoted to an examination of the relative merits of new highly integrated radio architectures which have been introduced within the last two years. One lecture is devoted to the basic design techniques of integrated Phase Locked Loops (PLLs), while the last lecture covers some of the fundamental operation and design issues of integrated CMOS Low Noise Amplifiers(LNA) and mixers.

Students enrolled in this course are assumed to have been exposed to a senior level college analog integrated circuits course. This video lecture course is offered through the Berkeley branch of the National Technological University, better known as CalVIEW. Engineers interested in purchasing the video tapes should contact the CalVIEW director Pam Atkinson.