SDR: Does it makes sense? Part 1/2

Posted by Praveen Raghavan on Jan 7 2008   

Howdie all, 

One of the things I personaly have been debating is SDR ready for deployment? Plenty of companies have come around with commericial solutions like Silicon Hive, NXP (former Philips), Infineon, Sandbridge, and others. For the un-initiated, SDR is the basic idea of if many wireless standards on a single chip.

One of the reasons I strongly believe it may just work is the following: 45nm node is most probably going to be still bulk-CMOS based. 32nm or 22nm technology is going to be FinFET based devices (atleast the critical path). Under the assumption that FinFET device requires 3X more costs, it makes more and more sense to ensure that many standards are performed on the same chip.

Another reason is that we (as a consumer)  never use more than 2 standards on the same device: say 11(a,b,g,n) and Bluetooth or other combinations. So it would make sense financially (hey thats what governs our industry), to put multiple on the same Silicon area (especially for consumer devices, where profit margins are low).

While the debate continues, it more and more startups seem to get VCs' support! This possibly implies that is still a market.

The next question that arises is that what parts to make 'Sofware-Definable'? Coming up in the next blog.

Ciao, till next blog.

Praveen

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posted by Praveen Raghavan
Praveen is a PhD researcher at IMEC vzw in Belgium. He is also a PhD candidate at KULeuven in Electrical Engineering, Belgium. He works in the area of digital signal processor design for low power Software Defined Radio. He received his master in Electrical Engineering from Arizona State University, USA and before which he received his Bachelors in Electrical Engineering from REC, Trichy, India. Praveen's interests include processor design, compilers for DSP, low power, system design. | Personal website

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