Flexible ADCs for wireless mobile radios

The evolution of wireless mobile devices calls for "all- in-one-device", which support a large number of wireless standards and allows wireless connectivity and roaming. This creates the need for adaptive circuits that are able to reconfigure themselves to trade-off power dissipation for performance, depending on the wireless standard to be supported and the required quality of service. Therefore, the key features of such mobile devices are flexibility and adaptability. This paper presents the ADCs suitable for mobile radios, keeping focus on flexible architectures. Finally, a programmable ADCs array, which can digitize signal bands from cellular to UWB is presented.