Portugal's integrated circuit intellectual property (IP) company Chipidea just announced the expansion of their RF IP line with two new designs. The first is a tuner designed for mobile DVB-H video additions in cell phones and other portable devices. The tuner has three separate inputs for the VHF (176 to 245 MHz), UHF (470 to 870 MHz) and microwave L-band (1.45 to 1.685 GHz) signals. The chip is fully compatible with all the various standards including DVB-H, DMB, ISDB-T and even MediaFLO. This open design eases integration into other SoC with a zero-IF architecture. No external filters are needed. The power consumption is minimal and the chip area is only 8 mm². A fractional-N synthesizer has a fully integrated loop filter. It can use the existing crystal in some designs. LDO regulators are included.

A second RF product is Chipidea's GPS receiver IP. This radio covers the GPS L1 band as well as the European Galileo L1 band and Russia's Glonass system. The basic architecture is a low-IF superheterodyne with on chip IF filtering. The input LNA is designed in but an external SAW filter is needed between the LNA and mixers. A fractional-N synthesizer is included with integrated loop filter. Again the goal was small chip area (< 5 mm²) and very low power consumption for portable designs.

Chipidea
www.chipidea.com