The Ralink 802.11n Chipset family provides solutions for
PCI, PCIe and USB interfaces with both 2.4 and 2.4/5GHz
suppport. Each chipset consists of two highly integrated ICs
(RFIC and BB/MAC IC) that fully comply with current draft
IEEE 802.11n and IEEE 802.11a/b/g standards.
Cognitive radios have become a vital solution that allows sharing of the scarce
frequency spectrum available for wireless systems. It has been demonstrated
that it can be used for future wireless systems as well as integrated into 4G/5G
wireless systems. Although there is a great amount of literature in the design of
cognitive radios from a system and networking point of view, there has been very
limited available literature detailing the circuit implementation of such systems.
Our textbook, Radio Frequency Integrated Circuit Design for Cognitive Radios, is
the first book to fill a disconnect in the literature between Cognitive Radio systems
and a detailed account of the circuit implementation and architectures required to
implement such systems. In addition, this book describes several novel concepts
that advance state-of-the-art cognitive radio systems.
This paper reviews key factors to practical ESD
protection design for RF and analog/mixed-signal (AMS) ICs,
including general challenges emerging, ESD-RFIC interactions,
RF ESD design optimization and prediction, RF ESD design
characterization, ESD-RFIC co-design technique, etc. Practical
design examples are discussed. It means to provide a systematic
and practical design flow for whole-chip ESD protection design
optimization and prediction for RF/AMS ICs to ensure 1 st Si
design success.
