Imec, Murata team on reconfigurable radio IC design

PARIS – Next generation wireless access asks for reconfigurable radios. Imec and Murata Manufacturing Co. Ltd. said they have sealed a three-year R&D collaboration to work on cognitive reconfigurable radio front-end.

Through the collaboration, Murata said it expects to better apprehend the technology and design challenges for next-generation reconfigurable radios. Murata and Imec said they intend to assess the impact on antenna interface components and identify new opportunities for next generation front-end modules.

“By combining fundamental rethinking of the circuit architectures and designs, and clever use of the benefits of deeply scaled digital CMOS technologies, we aim to develop reconfigurable radio transceivers competitive in terms of area, cost, performance and power consumption,” declared Liesbet Van der Perre, director of the green radio programs, in a statement. “The transceivers will cover all key broadband communication standards including LTE and LTE advanced, digital broadcasting and next-generation WiFi (802.11n/ac).”

Earlier this year, HiSilicon joined imec’s R&D program on cognitive reconfigurable radio to jointly conceive low-power and compact high-performance reconfigurable RF transceivers leveraging on state-of-the-art CMOS technology. The objective of the collaboration agreement was to develop innovative RF transceiver architectures for next-generation mobile terminals.

Imec said its reconfigurable radio front-end, named SCALDIO (scalable radio), is programmable to operate with all current and future cellular, wireless local area network (WLAN), wireless personal area network (WPAN), broadcast and positioning standards in the frequency range between 174MHz and 6GHz.

Imec has 2 generations of SCALDIO radio transceivers with proven silicon performance: SCALDIO-1 and SCALDIO-2. SCALDIO-2 has been realized in a digital SoC 40nm CMOS technology.