People often ask me why I chose to publish this work. Primarily, this book was
motivated by my experience in industry after having been in the academic world for
many years. We often hear about the need to bridge the gap between industry and
academia, but one can easily intellectually understand something without having
experienced it first hand. I lived in the gap between the academic and industrial
worlds for some time and saw how people on both sides can target the same application
and work toward the same goal, but do so from completely different angles.
Radio frequency (RF) IC designers in the industry do not have the luxury of time
to dig through the extensive publications that flood their field to understand the
latest developments related to their own circuits or systems. Researching the many
areas related to RF circuit design such as device models, fabrication technology,
signal analysis, and communication theory proves to be an insurmountable task.
Therefore, their circuit analysis, and thus optimization, can be easily curtailed
because of the time restraints inherent in the semiconductor industry. On the other
hand, university students of all levels are often so flooded in their own studies that
they lose the practical sense needed to make their research seem applicable to realworld
products – the world of RFIC design becomes dry and intangible. The main
purpose of this book is thus to help bridge the gap between academia and industry
in the area of nanometer CMOS RFIC design for one of the latest, most dynamic
wireless applications, the mobile TV.
In 2005, South Korea became the first country in the world to offer mobile TV
reception. Japan and several European countries soon followed, and the United
States and Canada are not far behind. This book explores the design, implementation,
and demonstration of highly linear, low power, RFICs that facilitate the integration
of TV service into cellular phones using nanometer CMOS technologies.
Emphasis is made on how to break the trade-off between power consumption and
performance (linearity and noise figure) by optimizing the mobile TV front-end
dynamic range in three hierarchical levels: the intrinsic MOSFET level, the circuit
level, and the architectural level.