Low Power multi-standard WLAN RF IC's
From a system point of view, the most widely used family of WLANs
is currently described by the IEEE 802.11 standard. For this standard
there are already commercial products available. However the maximum
data rate of 2Mb/s, defined by the standard does not meet today's
requirements anymore. Therefore IEEE standardization working groups
have defined newer sub-standards, such as IEEE 802.11a and the
IEEE 802.11g standard, which allows much higher data rates up
to 54 Mb/s. For these sub-standards there is a big developing
activity at present time. In order to become commercially successful
the fabrication costs for such systems must be low. This can only
be achieved by using a high level of integration in combination
with a high volume production.
Moreover, since such wireless systems are often used in battery
driven devices, the power consumption should be as low as possible.
For today’s handheld devices, such as laptops, PDAs and
cellular phones with integrated WLAN module, the power consumption
of the WLAN-part is still a crucial topic. To switch-on the WLAN
module usually results in a substantial decrease of the battery
operating time. One of the key-goals of this project is therefore
to develop a transceiver system compliant with the IEEE 802.11a
standard with very low power consumption. The necessary RF components
will be designed using a state-of-the art RF IC technology. Later
on the whole RF system will be integrated with very few chips,
preferably on one single chip.
One important market trend is to realize multi-standard WLAN
devices which cover all of the current and upcoming IEEE802.11
standards, such as a,b,g, etc. Due to the frequency allocation
of these systems the device must be able to cover the 2.4GHz as
well the 5GHz band and to process different modulation schemes.
This requires a high level of integration to come to a cost-effective
solution for high-volume for the targeted high-volume market.
A second key-topic of this project is therefore addressed to this
subject.
Dual
Band Image-Reject Receiver
for IEEE802.11a/b/g/h and HiPerLAN2 |
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