Julio Costa
Senior Manager, Silicon Technology Development
RF Micro Devices, Greensboro NC 27310
jcosta@rfmd.com


The cellular industry has recently become the largest consumer market in the world. Because of its size, it is a constant driver for new technologies, integration approaches and cost reductions in several different areas. This talk will focus on the dynamic evolution of the cellular RF Front-End (RFFE) technologies. RFFE is today defined as essentially all of the RF blocks required between antenna and digital baseband, covering the diversity switch, band select filters and duplexers, low noise amplifiers, RF power amplifiers, RF transceiver and frequency synthesizer and some power management functions. Many new opportunities exist for product differentiation by providing large scale integration of these features: technologies such as RF-MEMS switches and resonators could potentially replace GaAs PHEMT switches and surface-acoustic-wave filters; RF-CMOS could potentially displace Silicon Germanium Bipolar technologies in the receive section. Even the power amplifier, today dominated by III-V HBT amplifiers, could potentially be displaced by alternative silicon-based technologies. At an even larger scale, the digital baseband suppliers are now introducing products where some of the RF analog functions are being moved into the digital domain. This talk will give a broad overview of these competing approaches and the different research thrusts necessary for their implementation.