Infineon Teams With Motorola On 3G RF Chip Design

The result of a signed agreement, Infineon Technologies AG and Motorola will develop a multi-mode, single-chip 3G RF transceiver based on Infineon’s SMARTi UE chip. Addressing the growing market for 3G services, Motorola selected Infineon to develop an RF chip that will offer maximum HSDPA and HSUPA performance, efficient power consumption, and a compact design. Infineon’s SMARTi UE supports all global UMTS band combinations (I-VI and VIII-X) plus quad-band EDGE. Its DigRF3.09-compliant digital baseband interface is controlled via high-level commands from the baseband. Reportedly, this provides less overhead than currently available RF transceivers requiring high control and calibration traffic from the baseband. SMARTi UE also controls the entire radio with a real-time microcontroller. This promises less complex L1 software, faster development cycles, shorter calibration times, and better network performance. Samples of SMARTi UE, manufactured in Infineon´s 130-nm standard CMOS technology and housed in 6 mm x 6 mm BGA packages, have been shipped with production planned for the second half of 2008.