GSM/GPRS transceiver cuts board area in half

A Silicon Laboratories product story

Edited by the Electronicstalk editorial team Jun 10, 2004

The Aero II GSM/GPRS transceiver is billed as the industry's smallest, highest performance RF transceiver for cellular handsets.

The Aero II GSM/GPRS transceiver is billed as the industry's smallest, highest performance RF transceiver for cellular handsets.

Compared with competing solutions, the Aero II single-chip transceiver reduces component count and board space by half, making it the most integrated quad-band GSM/GPRS transceiver available.

Silicon Laboratories continues to offer market-leading integration and performance with the Aero II transceiver, which enables handset manufacturers to significantly reduce the bill of materials (BOM) while easing the design and manufacturing process.

The Aero II transceiver is the third generation of Silicon Laboratories' proven Aero transceiver family, which has shipped into tens of millions of GSM/GPRS handsets worldwide.

By implementing the Aero II transceiver in a standard 0.13-micron CMOS process, Silicon Laboratories was able to design the industry's most integrated single-chip transceiver in a tiny 5 x 5mm package.

With the addition of a receive SAW filter bank, the Aero II transceiver implements an entire quad-band radio, excluding the power amplifier and antenna switch, in an area less than 1.0cm2 using only five components: Aero II transceiver, crystal, SAW filter bank and two standard bypass capacitors.

"The Aero II transceiver raises the bar for the industry by not only simplifying the design process but also by further improving both the receive and transmit path performance over our previous industry-leading performance", said Ed Healy, Vice President of Silicon Laboratories.

"The third generation of the Aero family further demonstrates our commitment to reducing board space and improving performance and is a fundamental building block that will support customers as they plan their EDGE offerings".

Based on the company's patented technology and CMOS design innovation, the Aero II transceiver integrates all sensitive components including RF and IF voltage-controlled oscillators (VCOs), VCO tuning components, loop filters and clock coupling capacitors.

This integration simplifies design and ensures consistent performance for customers seeking turnkey RF designs.

The Aero II transceiver supports the use of a VC-TCXO module and provides the additional integration of a proven digitally controlled crystal oscillator (DCXO) that enables the use of a standard 26MHz crystal to provide the transceiver reference clock, thereby reducing the handset BOM.

Silicon Laboratories' Aero transceiver products use a software-programmable universal baseband interface allowing handset designers to implement the transceiver with all leading basebands.

The Aero transceivers are also fully compliant with GPRS Class 12 requirements, providing high-speed data communications to the mobile computing environment.

The Aero II transceiver is available in a compact 5 x 5mm 32-pin micro leadframe package (MLP).

Pricing begins at $4.94 in quantities of 10,000.

The Aero II transceiver is sampling now, and an evaluation board is available for $250.