SoC Integration of RF Front-End Passives

Hooman Darabi
Broadcom Corporation

Friday, January 22, 2010 at 10:00am
Engr IV Maxwell Room 57-124

Abstract
RF front-end passives, such as SAW filters or duplexers, have proven resistant to integration as part of a low-cost CMOS system-on chip (SoC). Traditional RF designs are unsuitable because of the modest quality factor for on-chip spiral inductors as well as manufacturing variation of on-chip capacitors limit performance. Important repercussions from continuing to use off-chip front-end passives are; higher cost, bigger physical space, and more complexity in PCB and package design, particularly for multi-mode, and multi-band applications such as cellular or soft-ware defined radios. In this tutorial we first study the system level requirements for front-end passives and discuss the SoC implementation challenges from the circuit point of view. We then introduce several architectural and circuit level techniques that can address these problems, followed by case studies for both 2G and 3G transceivers.

Biography
Hooman Darabi was born in Tehran, Iran in 1972. He received the BS and MS degrees both in Electrical Engineering from Sharif University of Technology, Tehran in 1994, and 1996 respectively. He received the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1999. He is currently a director, Engineering with Broadcom Corporation, Irvine, CA, where he is in charge of all the cellular RF IC developments. His interests include analog and RF IC design for wireless communications. Hooman holds over 120 issued or pending patents with Broadcom, and has published over 30 peer reviewed or conference papers.