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Texas Instruments RF chip poses SiGe threat

The chip-making giant says that its all-silicon RF chip for GSM handsets threatens the potential market for SiGe BiCMOS technology.

Texas Instruments (TI) has released details of an all-silicon wireless chip design, which it says will dramatically cut the cost and power consumption of RF communication.

The 90nm CMOS digital RF processor (DRP) design has been integrated on two Bluetooth products and a GSM/GPRS digital transceiver in TI’s laboratory.

The company released details of the chip at the International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) held in San Francisco last week.

DRP reduces power consumption, die area and system board space by up to 50% over conventional designs, said TI. The new design does not include a power amplifier, however.

Chips based on a SiGe: BiCMOS process can also integrate digital and analog functions, but TI says that this approach, which has been advocated by IBM among others, results in additional manufacturing expense because 4-5 reticules are needed for processing the SiGe transistors.

More problematic, says TI, is that the best lithography resolution available for SiGe is 130nm, itself only available from a few sources, lagging behind the 90nm feature sizes available with CMOS. “It is simply not prudent to adopt a wafer process strategy that doesn’t keep the system logic at the lowest possible cost at all times,” it said.

“Monolithic integration in SiGe: BiCMOS cannot offer adequate logic density,” added TI.

The company plans to begin sampling DRP chips to customers later this year.

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