ABSTRACT
Radio-frequency (RF) circuit design using silicon technologies has progressed over the past decade from
small-scale building blocks to complete systems-on-a-chip enabling applications such as 3G wireless
telephony [1]. The hundreds of active and passive components used in a handset in the mid-1990s were
reduced to a single silicon chip and a handful of passives (filters, capacitors, etc.) by 2000 [2,3]. This was
achieved through improvements in the technology, smaller passive components (small and lighter filter
packages), and innovations in circuit design and radio architecture. It can be argued that the current
success of wireless technology as a consumer product with mass-market appeal has been made possible
by the cost, size, and performance advantages of integration on silicon. The performance improvements
offered by silicon-germanium heterostructure bipolar transistors (SiGe HBTs) in BiCMOS technologies
are enabling even further advances in wireless transceiver performance and integration. The first section
of this chapter reviews the aspects of RF circuit design relevant to the design of wireless building blocks.
Low-noise amplifier (LNA), mixer, and voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) circuits are then examined
in detail.
