On Friday June 16th, 2006 the PRIME 2006 Conference organizes the short course "Analog Baseband Circuits for Telecommunication Systems".
This course is composed by two parts, which cover the most important functions of an analog baseband section of a telecom transceiver: the analog filters and the data converters. The abstract of the two parts follows.
The explosion of the telecommunication systems to be realized in IC form within a SoC requires a concurrent effort in developing efficient circuits & system solution for optimizing their performance. The aspects related to the analog baseband filtering (for both receiver and transmitter path) will be addressed in this tutorial. It will be shown that the filters for telecom transceivers requires very specific performance. This tutorial will deal with the most important techniques for the realization of analog filters embedded in the recently developed transceiver architectures. The lecture will start with the description of the typical architecture of transceivers and of their typically required performance for the embedded analog baseband filters. The key concept of this part is that different standards present different filter specifications that are satisfied by different filter topologies. In addition it will be discussed on how receiver filters (for blockers, adjacent channels, etc..) differ from transmitter filters (which have to operate as DAC reconstruction filters). The most popular (Active-RC, MOSFET-C, Gm-C) and the recently developed (Gm-Gm-C, and Active-Gm-RC) structures for continuous-time filters with their the possible tuning approach will be illustrated with particular attention to their use in a telecom transceiver. The topic will be addressed also from the technology point of view. The trend of the technology (of reducing power supply, and then linear range) vs. the trend of the telecom system (of increasing the required linearity to increase the amount of transmitted information) will be discussed.
These three hours presentation is on the design of data converters to be used in wireless architectures. The first part provides the background knowledge necessary to properly understand and design data converters. The mathematical implications and the limits associated to the use of data converters are discussed. In addition, specifications, with focus on the ones relevant for communication applications, are recalled. Since oversampling data-converters are more and more used in communications, the second presentation discusses oversampling techniques and goes in deep detail in studying the sigma-delta approach. The presentation will explain the differences between single bit and multi-bit and between sampled-data and continuous-time architectures. Various dynamic matching techniques will also be presented. The elements given in the first two presentations are the basis for understanding the description of a number of designs whose target was 3G and wireline applications. Since all of them have as key target the very low power, the presented solutions, proved on silicon, are the basis for a possible use or extension to future needs of portable 4G apparatuses.