An Adaptive Digital Front-End for Multi-mode Wireless Receivers

Today, customers are demanding handhelds with small form factors and increased functionality for multiple applications ranging from text messaging and telephony to receiving audio and video broadcast services. Furthermore, the ongoing evolution from 2G to 3G and beyond requires multi-mode operation of wireless transceivers. The increasing number of cellular standards together with the variety of frequency bands these standards use in different regions of the world require a high degree of reconfigurability of the baseband processing and the RF front-end. As a result, reconfiguration has become the key issue in the design of wireless terminals. Although complexity increases by implementing multi-standard and multi-functional terminals and by integrating previously separated building blocks on a single die, the current consumption of the terminal needs to be reduced at the same time.