Abstract

By far the single largest application for GaAs RFICs in commercial/consumer platforms is in mobile telephone handsets covering several standards such as analog AMPS, digital PCS TDMA and CDMA, Japanese PHS, European GSM, DCS1800 and DECT. However, a considerable number of technologies are potentially availabie for RFIC designs such as Si BiCMOS, Si LDMOS, SiGe, GaAs MESFET, GaAs pHEMT, AIGaAs and InGaP HBT. After a brief review of competing technologies, emphasis in this paper is placed on describing a number of examples of GaAs RFiC designs used in present telephones concentrating on the highest performance parts required in PCS and dual-band CDMA platforms. Integration of receive and transmit functions, providing substantial area reduction and integration improvement for next generation platform applications, will be described such as a PCS transmitter module containing GaAs upconverter, driver amplifier and power amplifier ICs. Technologies are compared for future higher levels of integration allowing the production of "one-chip radios".