A Nordic project on high speed low power design in sub-micron CMOS technology for mobile phones

This paper is a survey paper presenting the Nordic CONFRONT project and reporting some results from the group at CIE/DTU, Denmark. The objective of the project is to demonstrate the feasibility of sub-micron CMOS for the realisation of RF front-end circuits operating at frequencies in the 1.8-2.0 GHz range. The ultimate goal is a single-chip transceiver, requiring only an external band-pass filter between the chip and the antenna. DECT has been chosen as a comparative standard to compare the new approaches developed in the work as well as to facilitate good knowledge transfer to industry. All circuit design is based on state-of-the-art CMOS technology (0.5µm and below) including circuits operating at 2GHz. CMOS technology is chosen, since a CMOS implementation is likely to be significantly cheaper than a bipolar or a BiCMOS solution, and it offers the possibility to integrate the predominantly digital base-band processing on the same chip.