Renesas collaborates with IMEC on reconfigurable RF transceivers

Renesas Technology has entered into a strategic research collaboration with IMEC, Europe’s leading independent research center in the field of nanoelectronics, to perform research on 45 nm RF transceivers targeting Gbit/s cognitive radios. To this end, Renesas has joined IMEC’s software-defined radio (SDR) front-end program. This research program includes reconfigurable RF solutions, high-speed/low-power analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) and new approaches to digitize future RF architectures.

Researchers from Renesas will reside at IMEC to closely collaborate with IMEC’s research team. In this way, they will build a fundamental understanding and develop robust solutions for Renesas future mobile electronics products.

On the near term, IMEC’s SDR-front-end program targets the development of a new generation cost-, performance- and power-competitive reconfigurable radio in 45 nm digital CMOS technology. This radio will have a programmable center frequency from 100 MHz to 6 GHz and programmable bandwidth from 100 kHz to 40 MHz covering all key communication standards, with a merit comparable to state-of-the-art single mode transceivers.

The research program builds on IMEC’s previous groundbreaking 130 nm RF transceiver results (published at ISSCC 2007), namely the world’s first prototype of a true SDR transceiver IC (SCALDIO). Also, further evolutions of IMEC’s record breaking ADCs (merit record by IMEC at ISSCC 2008 of 40 Msamples/s, 9 bit, 54 fJ/conversion step) will be developed within this collaboration.

“We are excited that one of the world’s leading semiconductor companies has joined our SDR-front-end program,” comments Rudy Lauwereins, Vice President Nomadic Embedded Systems at IMEC.

“This proves the importance of our recent results on SDR and ADCs, and reflects the value IMEC brings to its industry partners in this RF research program.”

“The ability to develop an innovative RF architecture with scaled-down CMOS technology and circuit technologies in transceiver products supporting next-generation cellular standards such as 3GPP-LTE and 4G is one of the key differentiators for our products that are superior in cost advantages, performance and power,” said Masao Nakaya, board director and executive general manager of LSI product technology unit at Renesas Technology Corp.