Plenary Lecture
Design Techniques of Low Power RF IC for Wireless Communication
Professor Ahmed El Oualkadi
Laboratoire des Technologies de l’Information et de la Communication
Ecole Nationale des Sciences Appliquées de Tanger
Université Abdelmalek Essaadi
Morocco
E-mail: ahmed.eloualkadi@ieee.org
Abstract: The wireless communication market is undergoing a major expansion with the deployment of new technologies and standards opening the prospect of significant impacts in many application areas. In this context, the growing demands of wireless and mobile application products needs highly integrated, low cost and low power RFICs for modern transceivers. The emerging wireless technologies require architectures with reduced complexity, cost and power consumption; however, they require specific circuits with more accuracy and best performance. The CMOS technology which is the dominating technology for most wireless products below 10 GHz, is characterized by reliability, maturity, low manufacturing cost and low power consumption compared to traditional semiconductor technologies based on III-V compound materials such as SiGe and GaAs. In addition, CMOS is the most suitable technology for designing system-on-chip, since it enables integration of the analog RF circuits with the digital signal processing and baseband circuits in the lowest possible chip area, which leads to a lower cost and more compact solution. Today, CMOS technology is becoming the strong candidate for implementing low cost and less power consuming transceivers. Indeed, the interest on designing CMOS circuits and systems is growing rapidly offering a fertile ground for innovation. Despite the advantages of CMOS technology, the design of building blocks RF transceivers exhibits several challenges and difficulties that the designers must overcome. This lecture gives a review about the trends and challenges of RFIC design for low power wireless communication. The different design trade-offs will be discussed to optimize the proliferation of circuits and systems for the emergent wireless applications.
Brief Biography of the Speaker: Ahmed El Oualkadi received Ph.D. degree in electronics from the University of Poitiers, France, in 2004. From 2000 to 2003, he was a research assistant in the Laboratoire d’Automatique et d’Informatique Industrielle - Ecole Supérieure d’Ingénieurs de Poitiers, Electronics & Electrostatics Research Unit, University of Poitiers, France. In 2004, he was an assistant professor at University Institute of Technology, Angoulême, France. During this period, he worked, in collaboration with EADS-TELECOM, on various European projects which concern the nonlinear analysis & RF circuit design of switched- capacitor filters for radio-communication systems. In 2005, he joined the Université Catholique de Louvain, Microelectronics Laboratory, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, where he worked on the analog and mixed design of low power high temperature circuits and systems, in SOI technology, for wireless communication. During this period, he has managed and participated in several European and regional projects in the areas of wireless communication and sensor networking. Currently, he is an assistant professor in the Abdelmalek Essaadi University, National school of applied sciences of Tangier, Morocco. His main research interest is the analog IC, mixed-signal and RFIC design for wireless communication, embedded system applications and information technology. He is author/co-author of more than 40 publications and communications in recognized journals and international conferences. He is a member of EuMA and an active IEEE volunteer member associated to the Circuits & Systems Society where he is a reviewer of IEEE CAS systems journals (TCAS I & TCAS II) and many conferences on circuits and systems (ISCAS, ICECS…). He is a member of the scientific and technical committee of WCECS and WASET, a member of the editorial board of Journal of Multimedia Processing and Technologies and during 2007-2011, he was an editorial board member of Recent Patents on Electrical Engineering Journal edited by Bentham Science Publishers.