Texas Instruments today unveiled the details of a new approach to wireless chip design that simplifies radio frequency processing by moving the technology to a mostly digital architecture.

The company is presenting details at the International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) this week on how its digital RF processor design can reduce power consumption, die area and system board space by up to 50 percent over analog designs.

"We are moving as much of radio out of analog as possible," said Bill Krenik, advanced architecture manager with TI's Wireless Terminals Business Unit. "Analog radio circuitry is not the right architecture to move into CMOS."

The DRP advance takes TI closer to the goal stated by its departing CEO, Tom Engibous -- a single chip cell phone by the end of 2004. By creating such a device, the company leaves room on the board for advanced functions that go beyond basic cell phone communications such as cameras, color displays, GPS technology, additional memory and other functions.  Currently the RF function alone can occupy over 50 percent of the printed circuit board in a handheld device.

Already TI has implemented its DRP architecture into two Bluetooth products. And it has said it currently has a GSM/GPRS digital transceiver in the lab.

The advance is made possible because large blocks of CMOS logic can now operate at multi-GHz frequencies so that sampled-data processing techniques, switched-capacitor filters, oversampling converters and digital signal processors can now take over the role of analog amplifiers, filters and mixers, the company said in a statement.

TI has moved the few remaining analog components from silicon germanium to CMOS so both analog and digital use the same process technology.

"People have said we can't make any money on CMOS radio," Krenik said. "We disagree because we are moving most of radio into digital, not analog."

By: DocMemory
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