Alliance to develop innovative reconfigurable rf transceivers

Under the partnership, HiSilicon will join imec's R&D programme to develop low power and compact high performance reconfigurable rf transceivers leveraging on state of the art cmos technology. The researchers will investigate reconfigurable rf solutions, high speed, low power a/d converters and new approaches to digitise future rf architectures and minimise antenna interface requirements. According to imec, the research will combine fundamental rethinking of circuit architectures and designs with the benefits of the aggressively scaled technology – such as the high intrinsic speed of nanoscale transistors. The programme has been established in a bid to develop small, cost, performance and power competitive reconfigurable radio transceivers in 28nm digital cmos technology covering all key broadband communication standards. These include next generation cellular and connectivity standards such as LTE advanced and next generation Wi-fi (802.11ac). Chen Zhen, director of HiSilicon wireless chipset infrastructure architecture and system design, said: "We expect imec to keep on bringing innovative solutions that will be essential to develop our next generation multimode products. We hope that together with imec, we will realise innovative transceiver architectures utilising the advantages of new technologies (28nm cmos and beyond). We expect these solutions can drastically improve the performance while reducing area and power consumption."