A 9-band WCDMA/EDGE transceiver supporting HSPA evolution

The future of cellular radio ICs lies in the integration of an ever-increasing number of bands and channel bandwidths. Figure 21.2.1 shows the block diagram of our transceiver, together with the associated discrete front-end components. The transceiver supports 4 EDGE bands and 9 WCDMA bands (I-VI and VIII-X), while the radio can be configured to simultaneously support the 4 EDGE bands and up to 5 WCDMA bands: 3 high bands (HB) and 2 low bands (LB). The RX is a SAW-less homodyne composed of a main RX and a diversity RX. To reduce package complexity with so many bands, we chose to minimize the number of ports by using single-ended RF interfaces for both RX and TX. This saves several package pins, but requires careful attention to grounding. The main RX has 8 LNA ports and the diversity RX has 5, with some LNAs supporting multiple bands. On the TX side, 2 ports are used for all EDGE bands and 4 for the WCDMA bands.