Renesas Technology has entered into a strategic research collaboration with Belgian research centre IMEC to perform research on 45nm-based RF transceivers targeting gigabit per second cognitive radios.

Renesas has joined IMEC’s software-defined radio (SDR) front-end programme. This research programme includes reconfigurable RF transceivers, high-speed and low-power analogue-to-digital converters (ADCs) and new approaches to digitise future RF architectures.

Researchers from Renesas will reside at IMEC to closely collaborate with IMEC’s research team.

On the near term, IMEC’s SDR-front-end program targets the development of a reconfigurable radio in 45nm digital CMOS technology. This radio will have a programmable centre frequency from 100MHz to 6GHz and programmable bandwidth from 100kHz to 40MHz covering a wide range of communication standards.

“We are excited that one of the world’s leading semiconductor companies has joined our SDR-front-end programme. This proves the importance of our recent results on SDR and ADCs, and reflects the value IMEC brings to its industry partners in this RF research programme,” said Rudy Lauwereins, vice president of nomadic embedded systems at IMEC. “We are looking forward to a close cooperation with the Renesas research team, to develop together our upcoming generation of breakthrough RF designs.

“The ability to develop an innovative RF architecture with scaled-down CMOS technology and circuit technologies in transceiver products supporting next-generation cellular standards such as 3GPP-LTE and 4G’s is one of the key differentiators for our products that are superior in cost advantages, performance and power,” said Masao Nakaya, board director and executive general manager of the LSI product technology unit at Renesas Technology Corp. “We are pleased to be a part of IMEC’s SDR-front-end program, collaborating on the research to explore new technologies for multi-standard RF transceivers. We aim to contribute to the early realisation of next generation mobile phones by combining our advanced semiconductor solutions with IMEC’s R&D expertise in RF technology.”

Image: The IMEC programme aims to boost the flexibility of mobile communications handsets