TI’s goal in building radio frequency (RF) capabilities
into its CMOS processes is to enable single-chip radio technology
that will support wireless standards as diverse as GPS, GSM
and Bluetooth™. A key part of this effort is TI’s
development of DRP™, or digital RF processing, which
substitutes high-frequency digital processing for most of
the analog components traditionally used in RF transceivers,
allowing easier integration of the complete radio. In order
to create the system-on-a-chip (SoC) integration that will
enable a single-chip radio, TI is building RF into its advanced
CMOS processes from the start.
TI’s advanced CMOS process integrates the essential
RF elements without the expense of additional process
steps, enabling economical low-power SoC integration for
wireless communications.
The regular scaling of CMOS transistors works to the advantage
of RF by increasing switching speeds, thus permitting higher-frequency
operation. As with any high-frequency technology, noise must
be kept under careful control to prevent contamination of
low-frequency signaling. Designing a single-chip radio for
digital baseband processing requires that TI’s manufacturing
process support the integration of high-performance RF-optimized
CMOS and bipolar transistors, as well as passive components
such as inductors, varactors, metal-insulator-metal (MIM)
capacitors, and diffusion and silicide resistors. These components
handle the analog signal chain, while high-performance CMOS
logic and dense SRAM perform digital signal processing. Other
components include high-performance 1.8- and 3.3-V I/Os, drain-extended
MOS (DEMOS) to handle up to 5-V signaling, fully isolated
NMOS and up to eight levels of copper interconnect.
In TI’s 90-nm CMOS node, the essential RF and analog
components can be integrated with no additional process steps,
providing economical low-power system-on-a-chip (SoC) technology
for wireless components. The process also provides a flexible
basis for adding mask steps to build high-speed serializer-deserializers
(SERDES) and other functions.
Three generations of TI’s single-chip Bluetooth solutions
leverage TI’s RF CMOS technology and the DRP™
approach, including the BRF6150,
BRF6100
and BRF6300
BlueLink 5.0 platform. The technology was also critical in
the development of the industry’s first integrated,
single-chip solution for mobile phones.
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