A Glimpse of the Future

The RF and microwave world has largely been exempt from the rigors of Moore´s law, whereas aggressive scaling in the digital world has been the norm for several decades. But now, as CMOS transistors have picosecond switching speeds and transition frequencies in the tens to 100s of GHz, there is an opportunity for the integration of RF and microwave components into a complete system on a single integrated circuit (IC). Single-chip transceivers for wireless local area network (LAN) and femtocell base stations are already a commercial reality. As with complex digital systems, the demand for first-pass design success requires that accurate predictive models are available for the subsystem components of the whole system, enabling the system design to be simulated and any errors or faults remedied before the design is committed to hardware. This will save time and the cost of unnecessary fabrication and test of the complete system.