Combining its RF and DSP expertise, London, England-based RadioScape has developed a software-controlled, single-chip RF front-end that can handle six frequency bands for analog/digital radio applications. The developer claims that it is the first such part that can handle six different bands — band III and L-band for digital audio broadcasting (DAB), medium-wave, long-wave and short-wave for AM and digital radio Mondiale (DRM), and band II for FM. The RF chip combines with a standard DSP chip that runs its baseband digital radio software and controls the RF IC to form a two-chip solution, which reduces the power consumption and size of modules compared with current-generation solutions, according to Radioscape.

While this chip uses zero-IF and superheterodyne methods to achieve the stringent requirements of the variety of standards and frequencies, RadioScape's novel software-controlled approach enables a significant part of the implementation to use common circuitry. A major benefit of this challenging approach is the reduction of the external component count by more than 150 items relative to equivalent designs which implement these standards. The high level of integration of the chip enables the board real estate for the RF front-end to be reduced from 30 square centimeters (covering both sides of the board) to only nine square centimeters on a single-sided board design for all standards and even smaller if a subset of standards and frequency bands is required.

“This RF IC is a breakthrough technology for RadioScape that will revolutionize multistandard, multiband digital radio,” said John Hall, RadioScape's CEO. “There is nothing like it in the market and is the result of a major initiative that we started over two years ago to create a technology platform for our next-generation consumer radios. The objective was to create a highly flexible RF device that would complement our software-defined radio approach, timed to coincide with the emerging DRM market, and we have done that.”

Until now, the only way to create a comparable multiband digital radio was to create independent RF front-ends for each of the different frequency bands — each consuming power and adding to the bulk of the product. “Our unique partitioning of the radio system allows us maximum reuse of the digital components by loading only the appropriate baseband stack into the DSP as and when required.” explained Dave Hawkins, VP of business development at RadioScape.

“We have used the same approach in our RF IC, which reuses internal functionality to best suit the frequency band and standard required at the time. Dynamic configuration of the RF path on the RF IC is controlled by the DSP using software algorithms to ensure the optimization of performance and power consumption. The result is a multifrequency RF device that requires less than half the power used by the equivalent circuits in our current generation of multistandard modules.”

The RF IC will be used to create a range of modules that maintain the size and pin configurations of existing modules to enable manufacturers to benefit from this innovation. Details of the RF IC-enhanced modules will be available along with samples in June.

For more information, visit www.radioscape.com.

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