Introduction

The explosive demand in wireless-capable devices, especially with the proliferation of multiple standards, indicates a great opportunity for adoption of wireless technology at a mass-market level. The communication devices of both today and the future will have not only to allow for a variety of applications, supporting the transfer of characters, audio, graphics, and video data, but they will also have to maintain connection in a variety of environments with many other devices rather than with a single base station. Moreover, to provide various services from different wireless communication standards with higher capacities and higher data-rates, fully integrated and multifunctional wireless devices will be required.

Multifunctional circuits and systems can be made profitable by a large scale of integration, elimination of external components, reduction of silicon area, and extensive reuse of resources. Integration of (Bi)CMOS transceiver RF front-end and analog baseband circuits with computing CMOS circuits on the same silicon chip further reduces costs of multifunctional mobile devices.