Design space exploration for a UMTS front-end exploiting analog platforms

universal mobile telecommunication system (UMTS) front end design is challenging because of the need to optimize power while satisfying a very high dynamic range requirement. Dealing with this design problem at the transistor level does not allow exploring efficiently the design space, while using behavioral models does not allow taking into consideration important second-order effects. We present an extension of the platform-based design methodology originally developed for digital systems to the analog domain to conjugate the need of higher levels of abstraction to deal with complexity as well as the one of capturing enough of the actual circuit-level characteristics to deal with second order effects. We show how this methodology applied to the UMTS front-end design yields power savings as large as 47% versus an original hand optimized design.