IMEC unveils software-defined radio model
By Ed Sperling, Editor in Chief -- EDN, April 4, 2007
While most exhibitors at the Embedded Systems Conference hawk their latest chips or intellectual property, IMEC—the Belgian research house—showed up with a different kind of pitch. It created a reference design for software-defined radio.
IMEC’s goal is to satisfy a triumvirate of demands that include low power, low cost and a short turnaround time for a final product. The research house also built in flexibility to be able to pull in signals across a wide spectrum that includes everything from data to radio signals, said Bart Van Poucke, technical business director at IMEC. At the high end of the spectrum, the design will receive signals from 100MHz to 600MHz, with the capability of extending that all the way up to 10GHz. In addition, it supports signals from 40MHz to 500MHz.
In the United States, the spectrum from 30MHz to 174MHz is considered Very High Frequency, or VHF. Ultra High Frequency, or UHF, runs from 328.6MHz up to 2.3GHz, while Super High Frequency (SHF) runs from 2.9GHz up to 30GHz.
VHF is normally associated with broadcast television, while parts of the spectrum are extremely specific. For example, the range from 108MHz up to 138MHz is associated with government and space communications, while 156MHz is the purview of maritime communication. As a result, being able to dial in directly to specific parts of the spectrum can determine the use of a device.
Van Poucke noted that the design achieves low power consumption by responding only to signals in defined bandwidth ranges. Moreover, because the changes can be made in software, a single chip design can work with multiple bandwidth ranges. That means the design can serve both the high-end of the handheld market as well as the low end using the same hardware.
“This may be a way to come up with cheap handsets because the re-use of hardware is very cheap,” he said. “You could use exactly the same silicon.”
The design is based on what IMEC refers to as run-time cross-layer control algorithms, which allow the device to be reconfigured everywhere from the analog-to-digital converts to the baseband and video codecs to maximize power efficiency. That efficiency is increased because it operates on a single chip instead of multiple chips that are now used, Van Poucke said.
IMEC expects tapeout of its design to begin this summer. The researcher says it normally takes about two to three years before research turns into market acceptance.
