Leuven, Belgium and Tokyo, Japan: Renesas Technology Corp. and IMEC (an independent nanoelectronics research center) will collaboratively perform research on 45nm RF transceivers that target gigabit-per-second cognitive radios. Upon this agreement, Renesas effectively joins IMEC’s software-defined radio (SDR) front-end program.

IMEC’s SDR program targets the development of a new-generation reconfigurable radio in 45nm digital CMOS technology that’s cost-, performance-, and power-competitive. Plans are for the radio to have a programmable center frequency from 100MHz to 6GHz, and programmable bandwidth from 100kHz to 40MHz covering all key communcation standards. Included in the research will be reconfigurable RF solutions, high/low-speed analog-to-digital converters, and new approaches to digitize future RF architectures.