NEC and NEC Electronics have announced the development of a reconfigurable analog baseband LSI for Software Defined Radio (SDR). The LSI realizes reconfigurability to enable several filter types, including Butterworth, Chebyshev and elliptic. All of the filter types are achieved by a simple change in the pulse width of the control signal.

The newly developed LSI is capable of filtering out unwanted signals in the frequency range of 400 kHz to 30 MHz enabling it to support simultaneously multiple wireless standards for existing and future mobile system standards such as mobile phone, broadcasting, and wireless LAN systems. Contained in a small chip area 0.57-mm-square, the LSI can also change the type of filter depending on the wireless standard.

In the past it has been difficult to incorporate SDR into mobile equipment since the existing SDR technology relied upon selective switching of transceiver devices that resulted in a large mounting area of existing chips for each wireless standard. One of the key building blocks for the novel SDR transceivers is an analog baseband that includes tunable filters. The new slim, compact analog baseband LSI has been achieved by the development of a pulse-width-controlled reconfigurable filter for changing filter type and/or bandwidth.

In recent years, the need for mobile terminals to support several wireless functions has been rapidly increasing with the progressive integration of information and communication devices. However, these mobile terminals need to be able to support multiple wireless standards without increasing the die and/or mounting area. This need can be met by SDR transceivers as they can change the RF building-block function and receive the appropriate wireless standard signal just by a simple change in software.

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