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Renesas Teams Up With IMEC On Reconfigurable RF Transceivers

May 6, 2008

Renesas Technology has entered into research collaboration with IMEC, Europe's independent nanoelectronics research centre. The joint venture will concentrate on developing 45nm RF transceivers targeted at Gbit/s cognitive radios. Accordingly, Renesas has joined IMEC's software-defined radio (SDR) front-end program. This research program includes reconfigurable RF solutions, high-speed/low-power analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) and new approaches to digitize future RF architectures.

Researchers from Renesas will be located at IMEC's facility during the collaborative work.

In the near term, IMEC's SDR-front-end program will focus on the development of a new generation cost-, performance and power-competitive reconfigurable radio in 45nm digital CMOS technology. This radio will have a programmable centre frequency from 100MHz to 6GHz and programmable bandwidth from 100kHz to 40MHz covering all key communication standards, with a merit comparable to state-of-the-art single mode transceivers.

The research program is expected to build on IMEC's previous 130nm RF transceiver work which included the world's first prototype of a true SDR transceiver IC (SCALDIO). Also, further versions of IMEC's ADCs (merit record by IMEC at ISSCC 2008 of 40Msamples/s, 9 bit, 54fJ/conversion step) will be developed within this collaboration.

About the Author

Paul Whytock | Editor-in-Chief

Paul Whytock is European Editor for Microwaves & RF and European Editor-in-Chief for Electronic Design. He reports on the latest news and technology developments in Europe for his US readers while providing his European engineering audience with global news coverage from the electronics sector. Trained originally as a design engineer with Ford Motor Co., Whytock holds an HNC in mechanical, electrical, and production engineering.