The radio frequency (RF) and wireless market has suddenly expanded to unimaginable dimensions. Devices such as pagers, cellular and cordless phones, cable modems, and RF identification tags are rapidly penetrating all aspects of our lives, evolving from luxury items to indispensable tools. Semiconductor and system companies, small and large, analog and digital, have seen the statistics and are striving to capture their own market share by introducing various RF products.

RF design is unique in that it draws upon many disciplines unrelated to integrated circuits (ICs). The RF knowledge base has grown for almost a century, creating a seemingly endless body of literature for the novice.

This book deals with the analysis and design of RF integrated circuits and systems. Providing a systematic treatment of RF electronics in a tutorial language, the book begins with the necessary background knowledge from microwave and communication theory and leads the reader to the design of RF transceivers and circuits. The text emphasizes both architecture and circuit level issues with respect to monolithic implementation in VLSI technologies. The primary focus is on bipolar and CMOS design, but most of the concepts can be applied to other technologies as well. The reader is assumed to have a basic understanding of analog IC design and the theory of signals and systems.

The book consists of nine chapters. Chapter 1 gives a general introduction, posing questions and providing motivation for subsequent chapters. Chapter 2 describes basic concepts in RF and microwave design, emphasizing the effects of nonlinearity and noise.

Chapters 3 and 4 take the reader to the communication system level, giving an overview of modulation, detection, multiple access techniques, and wireless standards. While initially appearing to be unnecessary, this material is in fact essential to the concurrent design of RF circuits and systems.

Chapter 5 deals with transceiver architectures, presenting various receiver and transmitter topologies along with their merits and drawbacks. This chapter also includes a number of case studies that exemplify the approaches taken in actual RIF products.

Chapters 6 through 9 address the design of RF building blocks: low-noise amplifiers and mixers, oscillators, frequency synthesizers, and power amplifiers, with particular attention to minimizing the number of off-chip components. An important goal of these chapters is to demonstrate how the system requirements define the parameters of the circuits and how the performance of each circuit impacts that of the overall transceiver.

I have taught approximately 80% of the material in this book in a 4-unit graduate course at UCLA. Chapters 3, 4, 8, and 9 had to be shortened in a tenweek quarter, but in a semester system they can be covered more thoroughly.

Much of my RF design knowledge comes from interactions with colleagues. Helen Kim, Ting-Ping Liu, and Dan Avidor of Bell Laboratories, and David Su and Andrew Gzegorek of Hewlett-Packard Laboratories have contributed to the material in this book in many ways. The text was also reviewed by a number of experts: Stefan Heinen (Siemens), Bart Jansen (Hewlett-Packard), Ting-Ping Liu (Bell Labs), John Long (University of Toronto), Tadao Nakagawa (NTT), Gitty Nasserbakht (Texas Instruments), Ted Rappaport (Virginia Tech), Tirdad Sowlati (Gennum), Trudy Stetzler (Bell Labs), David Su (Hewlett-Packard), and Rick Wesel (UCLA). In addition, a number of UCLA students, including Farbod Behbahani, Hooman Darabi, John Leete, and Jacob Rael, "test drove" various chapters and provided useful feedback. I am indebted to all of the above for their kind assistance.

I would also like to thank the staff at Prentice Hall, particularly Russ Hall, Maureen Diana, and Kerry Reardon for their support.