NEW YORK-By incorporating Silicon Germanium into its components for wireless handsets, CommQuest Technologies, Encinitas, Calif., announced Sept. 14 it has advanced significantly toward its goal of offering a Global System for Mobile communications phone-on-a-chip within a few years.
The IBM Corp. subsidiary said Silicon Germanium (SiGe) offers numerous advantages compared with standard silicon technology, including higher-performance processing to accelerate switching speeds, support of high frequencies up to 120 GHz for data applications, smaller device designs and higher levels of function integration, said CommQuest.
Silicon Germanium semiconductor technology, which IBM developed, is superior in several respects to existing components technologies, including Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS), Bipolar and Gallium Arsenide (GaAs), according to CommQuest.
Improved power efficiencies increase talk and standby times. SiGe technology will allow handsets to achieve power efficiency of at least 60 percent, “while today’s GaAs and bipolar-based handsets offer no more than 50 percent in commercial GSM applications,” the company said. Gallium Arsenide technology also costs four times as much as Silicon Germanium technology.
“This announcement signifies a major step toward our aggressive goal of a fully integrated, high-performance phone-on-a-chip by 2001,” said Hussein S. El-Ghoroury, president and chief executive officer of CommQuest.
Using SiGe, CommQuest plans to interconnect radio front-end integrated circuits in order to permit the low-noise amplifier and the power amplifier/voltage controlled oscillator (PA/VCO) to be designed as a single device. Samples of the integrated amplifier will be available in November, with oscillator samples available during the first quarter of next year.
The integration of front-end components reduces handset costs and allows for smaller handset design. Use of a tri-band chipset will lower component counts and improve device assembly efficiencies for decreased production costs and a 30-percent reduction in overall system costs, CommQuest said.
“CommQuest’s advanced tri-band ICs are easily configured for single-, dual- or tri-band applications, thus eliminating the added cost of producing multiple end-user devices for the world’s three GSM frequency bands,” the company said.
Other features of the SiGe-based GSM tri-band chipset will include voice recognition, echo cancellation and multislot capability for high-speed data services.
The company said beneficiaries of its new technology will include original equipment manufacturers without extensive internal product design capabilities that wish to enter the handset market quickly while also limiting their risks.
