| Recent years have seen an explosion in popularity of wireless communications with a plethora of new standards, devices and applications being introduced. At the heart of any wireless communication system is the transceiver. It performs the basic operation of frequency translation for both receiving and transmitting signals, as well as reduction in noise and interference along with signal selection and amplification. In addition to these basic functions, many wireless transceivers are required to operate in difficult RF environments while being low-cost and low-power for the mobile consumer market.; In this work, a review of radio frequency integrated circuit (RFIC) transceiver architectures is presented along with a new smart antenna transceiver architecture based on a novel integrated phase shifter design. The smart antenna transceiver is shown to improve the signal to noise ratio by 3dB and provide up to 40dB interference rejection for a two antenna system. The major challenges in highly integrated transceiver design, such as pushing and pulling and DC offsets, are discussed and ways of mitigating these affects are presented. Major system blocks with a focus on those causing and suffering from the aforementioned problems are discussed, with detailed sections on voltage controlled oscillator design and local oscillator generation circuits. Finally, inductor design and modeling is presented.; Taking the above discussions into account several designs have been fabricated using TSMC 0.18mum CMOS technology. Test results are presented for several smart antenna transceiver chips, phase shifter chips, several VCOs and LO generation schemes, and inductors. |
