TABLE OF CONTENTS To newcomers to the field of RF front-end design for wireless communications, the combination of rapid change in commercial standards and requirements, the choice of system architectures and frequency plans, and their relation to the performance of individual radio frequency circuits can be quite bewildering. The four contributions included in this chapter address these issues from different perspectives in varying degrees of detail.
The first two contributions come from academia and are biased towards basic theory. The second two contributions come from industry, providing more insight into the current state-of-the-art in wireless transceivers, and the overall system requirements in terms of cost, size (volume), and performance.
Qiuting Huang focuses on the fundamental issue of phase noise in RF oscillators, which is particularly important for wireless transceivers as it strongly affects the relative independence between different radio channels and services that transmit and receive signals of varying strengths simultaneously. In addition to avoiding unsound assumptions, the analyses of oscillation amplitude, oscillator response to interfering signals, and the identification of white noise sources have all been backed up with controlled experiments.
Behzad Razavi exposes the fundamental issues of frequency planning in transceiver design, as well as recent trends in highly integrated RF circuit design, in the context of a GSM/DCS dual-mode transceiver. The architecture is designed for a high level of integration, containing neither external image-reject filters nor IF filters. Quadrature...
