Software Defined Radio System-On-Chip, PI: A/P Yeo Kiat Seng, NTU

Currently, there exist many communications standards operating in different frequency bands and the expanding growth of wireless communications has led to the proliferation of these different standards. The operational frequency bands of these modern mobile/wireless systems, such as GSM900/1800, 3G mobile, Bluetooth, IEEE802.11, vary from 900 MHz to 5.1-5.9GHz. The highly competitive market demands low-cost, low-power, and small form-factor devices. This calls for the development of a single-chip receiver capable of adapting to the various wireless/mobile communications standards in a low-cost CMOS technology with more functions implemented in software, leading to the software-defined radio (SDR). A software radio is an open architecture, which connects modularized and standardized hardware units in bus to construct a universal platform, and through software embedded, to realize various radio communication functions. Generally, a SDR can be split into two main blocks namely RF front-end and baseband. The main bottlenecks for SDRs are the wide/multi-band RF front-end SoC (system-on-chip) with programmable features for the channel selections/controls and configurable/programmable basedband algorithms. The main objective of this research project is to develop a wide/multi-band RF front-end SoC to realize the front-end software radio system that can be easily configured by software to operate with the many existing worldwide air-interface standards, and a wide range of future protocols for the universal mobile/wireless telecommunication systems.