Pre-Symposium Tutorial -- Wireless Made Simple

The escalating markets of wireless applications in cellular, Internet, cordless or notebook PC devices have impacted and benefited our daily life more and more. These seemingly ubiquitous wireless gadgets are exposed so much around our working and living environments that they stimulate people’s inquiries and interests in generic principles of their operations.

This non-expert oriented wireless tutorial workshop will cover various, generic RF principles in the conceptual senses instead of quantitative details. Physics concepts will be illustrated by examples to explain trade-offs, issues or problem solving in the front-end RF layer and related back-end digital signal modulations of wireless communications.

Major commercial wireless markets in WWAN / WLAN / WPAN appliances and their RF standards are to be summarized, and will be highlighted on the key factors. Examples will address some newest digital baseband modulations and their impacts to RFIC designs, pros and cons, and the architectural choices.

The CMOS and SiGe BiCMOS processes are also compared in the RFIC performance with Intersil’s 802.11b case study on the low-noise-amplifier and receiver mixer designs. Other sampled transmitter’s power amplifier specs of IEEE / FCC compliance and RFIC layout will be reviewed for some critical points.

On a system level, the EM wave’s propagations, coverage ranges and their modeling will illustrate the physics concepts of wireless transmission over air and obstacles. The antenna’s applications in wireless systems will also offer radiation’s concepts and patterns.

Hope this workshop provides a good balance between the depth and the breadth of the non-expert audience’s interests in RFICs and other wireless aspects. Longer discussions for some questions could be held in the part-2 Q&A session.

The New Challenges in Mobile Wireless Communication And it's Impact on RFIC Industry

The mobile wireless communication has changed very rapidly. Now the handset has become lighter, smaller, and has more extended talking time each year. The key driver behind the scene is the IC in the handset. IC can be classified as the baseband IC and the RFIC. Baseband IC consists of the elements such as DSP, CPU, memory, etc. RFIC consists of the amplifier, filter, and passive components. The design of the latter one is much harder than that of the former one. RFIC design is an art and needs to go up the learning curve. In Taiwan, the IC fab industry is dominant in the world; the PC industry is prominent in the world; and, the handset industry is also very strong. Only the RFIC design is relatively weak. It becomes natural to develop a RFIC design house in Taiwan. In addition, Taiwan industry has a skill that no other countries can compete. That is the manufacturing skill. Taiwan can make any product, high quality with low cost. As we have seen, CMOS/RFIC still remains strong in the foreseeable future. Moore’s law still applies. With good RFIC design, the wireless handset can consume less power and increase functions. The handset itself will become a pico computer. It will change the average person’s daily life. All the personal information will be stored in the pico computer. Many features such as e-mail, location, video camera, entertainment, conference call, videoconference, and etc., travel with the person. With this pico computer handset, we can protect ourselves wherever we go, and we can see the future society becoming safer to live.

Next-Generation Wireless LAN Technology

The availability of unlicensed bands and low-cost CMOS technology for broadband wireless communication have dramatically changed the wireless landscape in the past few years. The wireless network strategies provided by the cell phone industry are fundamentally inadequate due a combination of high cost and low performance. The newly established high-performance, low-cost model by wireless LAN technology has the potential to provide wide-area wireless connectivity at 1000 times the speed and a fraction of the cost. This democratic network model can rapidly exploit new technologies, as opposed to the telecom solutions which are limited by legacy systems and cost of infra-structure. Distributed, instantaneous deployment of wireless networks will allow seamless connectivity of a multitude of communication and consumer devices. State-of-the-art developments of the wireless LAN technology will be given in this talk, along with the opportunities for future innovations.

Wireless Home Networking: The Next Generation of Consumer Electronic Products

Today there are about 9 million households world-wide that have a home network – by 2006, 37 million homes will have a home network. What are people using home networks for? What is driving the need for networks in the home? Wireless (Wi-Fi) networking is also one of the fast growing market segments in the industry and is expected to be the standard topology for connecting devices around the home. Linksys will discuss what is driving the need for wireless networks in the home.

Consumer Electronic device such as TVs, phones, radios, cameras, DVD players, games etc, will inevitably communicate with the PC and other devices on the home network. Linksys explore the types of devices around the home that can communicate with each other today and that will be able to in the future - to form the Wireless Home. These devices will come from entertainment, communications, personal computing and home automation. The convergence of consumer electronic devices and networking products will enable people to communicate effectively while enhancing their lifestyle. But what will drive the convergence and how soon will consumers be able to have a home of the future? Who will be delivering products for customers to use and why will people want them? Linksys will also spend some time talking about the challenges and also discuss what has to happen in the industry to make the home of the future possible.

RFIC Development in Taiwan Industry

Wireless communication is now a very hot topic in Taiwan’s electrical industry. For portability, the wireless communication products or subsystems built on integrated circuits (IC) provide the best solutions. In Taiwan, with the biggest foundry support from TSMC and UMC, there are already a lot of IC design houses working on different kinds of IC products, including RFIC. In this talk, we will describe the status on the development of RFIC in Taiwan industry, focusing on the RFIC design houses. In particular, we will brief the kinds of RFIC products to be introduced, including the predicted schedule for RFIC production. Besides the industry-wise development of RFIC, we will also cover the status of the on-going RFIC projects in ITRI (Industrial Technology Research Institute), one of the main research organizations working on RFIC in Taiwan, as well as recent results of those projects. For RFIC to be safely fabricated, assembled, tested, and produced, especially when the fabrication uses the very-deep-submicron RF CMOS technology, one of the most important reliability issues is the ESD (electrostatic discharge) problem. All IC products must have safe-enough on-chip ESD protection design, including RFIC. However, with the RF signal operating around giga-Hz, the parasitic effects from the on-chip ESD protection circuits, which are placed to the input/output pads of IC, often cause serious degradation on the RF circuit performance of the RFIC, especially on the RF LNA (low noise amplifier) and RF PA (power amplifier). But, without safe-enough on-chip ESD protection, the RFIC will get a high yield loss during the assembly, testing, and production. In this talk, we will show the state-of-the-art ESD protection for RFIC with comparisons on ESD robustness between Taiwan’s design and those of the overseas. Finally, we will introduce the “TopESD Solutions”, developed by the SoC Technology Center of ITRI, which hold a lot of issued US patents on ESD protection solutions to modern IC products, including the RFIC.

The Current Progress and the Future Perspective of RFIC Research in Taiwan's Academic Institutes

The research in the Universities have been playing an important role in the high-tech industry in Taiwan during the last twenty years, where the Universities provide the well-trained engineers, technology transfer and preliminary studies for the advanced technologies. The RFIC technology is one of the best example to address this relationship.

The RF related technologies and education activities had been highly restricted in the past in Taiwan, especially in the so called "white color threaten era". However, since the commercial wireless communication received a great attention about a decade ago, the government realized that this was virtually a desert in Taiwan in terms of the RF wireless technologies. Since then, several main programs have been initiated by the government, from the National Science Council and the Ministry of Education, to financially encourage the Universities working on the RF related technologies and education. These incentive programs indeed attracted the faculties modifying their research topics and involved in this field, and this trend has been continuously in progress till now. In particular, a few talent overseas faculties have gone back to Taiwan, stimulating the plain environment. Averaging more than one hundred well RF trained MS and PhD students join the industry every year. The number of published papers increases rapidly as well. In addition, due to the strong base of semiconductor chip fabrication in Taiwan, we can easily access theses advanced device technologies, such as CMOS, HBT and pHEMT, to realize the RFIC, which is unique in the world as far as the Universities research and education are concerned.

In this talk, the infrastructure of this RFIC development in the last ten years will be introduced. The current RFIC research progress in the main Universities will be presented. Finally, the future Universities-Industry bridge platform and business model will be elaborated based on the personal points of view.

RF CMOS in the next decade

Not too long ago, the term "RF CMOS" was largely considered oxymoronic. With the growing commercial success of numerous RF CMOS circuits (and of companies built around this technology), however, there is no longer any doubt about the viability of CMOS for many RF applications. Is this trend to persist indefinitely? Will the availability of deep-submicron CMOS technology be a fundamental enabler for future RF circuits and systems? In that context, we'll briefly review how continued process scaling affects the performance of key RF building blocks, and assess what benefits (if any) might accrue from such scaling. Examples drawn from GPS, WiFi, WPAN, millimeter-wave radar, and UWB will help illustrate where, and where not, scaling improves performance. Throughout, we remain mindful that nature imposes significant constraints on propagation, preventing a Moore's law-like expansion of useful spectrum. We additionally remain mindful that many RF products are commoditized almost before they are productized. All of these factors must be considered together in discerning the outlines of RF CMOS in the next ten years.

Advanced Technology of RFIC Manufacturing in Taiwan

TSMC is the one of the dedicated foundries to offer the 0.35-æm, 0.25-æm, 0.18-æm, 0.15-æm and 0.13-æm CMOS processes with a comprehensive design kit for mixed-signal/RF integrated circuits. The design kit includes complete device library and component library, with associated database, design guideline, and models at both base-band and RF-band. Ready-to-plug-in solutions are equipped with the combination of database and model, which allow customers to reduce the guesswork and thus significantly shorten the concept-to-silicon cycle. All these developments are expected to open the door to a first silicon success with accurate performance predictions as well as high degree of integration toward the SOC (system-on-a-chip) solution.

Mixed-signal/RF CMOS processes have been specifically developed to meet the needs of the fast-changing telecommunications market. These processes enable the realization of smaller device dimensions, increased performance and reduced costs relative to current BiCMOS and Gallium Arsenide (GaAs) alternatives. In addition, they include all the necessary building blocks for mixed-signal/RF IC devices for applications such as communication switches, transceivers, set-top boxes, and the latest in Bluetooth designs.

The mixed-signal/RF CMOS processes have recently been used to manufacture the world's first fully integrated single-chip Bluetooth transceiver, which is an all-CMOS 2.4 GHz RF integrated circuit.

TSMC is one of the first pure-play foundries to offer Silicon Germanium (SiGe) BiCMOS technology, which is expected to be in high demand for high performance and low power communications applications. Combining the integration and cost benefits of standard CMOS with the speed of more esoteric and expensive technologies such as GaAs, SiGe is ideally suited for communications and wireless/optical networking designs. Some foundries' 0.35-æm SiGe BiCMOS is available to serve designers and 0.18-æm SiGe BiCMOS can be ready by late 2003. Products designed for and manufactured on SiGe process provide dramatically greater functions with fewer chips.