TABLE OF CONTENTS Radio-frequency (RF) circuit design used to be realized using discrete bipolar devices, and later integrated bipolar technology was used as well. However, because of the dramatic growth of mobile communications and the need for providing highly miniaturised, cheaper equipment, there has been a recent surge of interest in realizing RF circuits in CMOS technology.
One of the challenges in RF design concerns the design of the front-end receiver section, whose main role is to interface the radio frequency bands allocated for communication with the baseband unit, which performs the bulk of the information processing functions needed in modern radio communications. Conceptually, such an RF front-end receiver can be viewed as a mixed-signal processing and conversion chain which combines a tunable bandpass filtering function, an analog-to-digital converter (ADC), and a digital signal processor (DSP), as schematically illustrated in Fig. 12.1.
Whilst previous sections of this book have been concerned with the practical realization of circuit and system solutions that provide the equivalent functionality of the tunable bandpass filter, this section is concerned with the design and integrated-circuit implementation of the analog-to-digital conversion function. At...
