This book introduces a completely novel architecture that can relax the trade-off existing today between noise, power and area consumption in a very suitable solution for advanced wireless communication systems. Through the combination of charge-domain operation with incremental signaling, this architecture gives the best of both worlds, providing the reduced area and high portability of digital-intensive architectures with an improved out-of-band noise performance given by intrinsic noise filtering capabilities. Readers will be enabled to design higher performance radio front-ends that consume less power and area, especially with respect to the transmitter and power amplifier designs, considered by many the “battery killers” on most mobile devices.
Pedro Emiliano Paro Filho received the B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Campinas, Brazil, in 2009 and 2012, respectively. He joined IDEA Electronic Systems as a design engineer in 2009, working on (de)modulators for the ISDB-T standard. In 2010, he was an intern in the wireless team at IMEC, Belgium, and since 2012 he is working towards the Ph.D. degree at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, also in collaboration with IMEC. His research interests are analog /RF circuit design for Software-Defined Radio (SDR), focusing on digital-intensive transmitter architectures for multi-standard radios, in CMOS.
Jan Craninckx (M’98–SM’07) received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in microelectronics summa cum laude from the ESAT-MICAS Laboratories of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, in 1992 and 1997, respectively. His Ph.D. work was on the design of low-phase noise CMOS integrated VCOs and synthesizers. From 1997 until 2002, he worked with Alcatel Microelectronics (later part of STMicroelectronics) as a Senior RF Engineer on the integration of RF transceivers for GSM, DECT, Bluetooth, and WLAN. In 2002, he joined IMEC, Leuven, Belgium, where he is currently Chief Scientist in the Analog Wireless Research group. His research focuses on the design of RF transceiver front-ends for software-defined radio (SDR) systems, covering all aspects of RF, analog, and data converter design. He has authored or co-authored more than 50 papers and several book chapters, and has published one book in the field of analog and RF IC design. He is the inventor of 10 patents. Dr. Craninckx is the chair of the SSCS Benelux chapter, and is a member of the Technical Program Committee for both the ISSCC and ESSCIRC conferences.
Piet Wambacq received the Diploma in Electrical Engineering, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, 1986 and PhD. in Electrical Engineering, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, 1996. He is Principle scientistat imec, Belgium, 1996 – today. He is also Part-time lecturer at Vrije Universiteit Brussel, department ETRO since 2000, as well as part-time “hoofddocent” at ETRO, teaching Analog Electronics at the Master’s level. He has been Promoter of 8 past PhDs and 18 ongoing PhDs. Since 2012 he has been a member of the program committee of the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC), which is the flagship conference in the field of Integrated Circuit design. He has been the Chair of the RF subcommittee of ISSCC since 2016, as wsell as a Member of the technical program committee of the European Solid-State Circuits Conference since 2007. He is a Past associate editor of the IEEE Transactions of Circuits and Systems – Part I and has more than 250 publications in conferences, journals. He is the author of two books and editor of one book.
