Plenary #1
"RF-Modems the Real Application for RF CMOS"

Stefan Wolff
Vice President RF-Engines, Infineon Technologies

Over the last decade wireless connectivity has become an integral and essential part of our life. The plain mobile phone of the early nineties has involved in mobile multimedia terminal. Consumers are demanding cell phones providing a comprehensive set of advanced features enabling voice, data and video services. Handset manufacturer have to accommodate their products to fast changing market requirements. The semiconductor supplier has to provide a cost effective and flexible platform, which enables the handset manufacturers to differentiate their products quickly and still maintaining a low development effort.

The vast majority of today's cell phones require at least a multiband radio. In the near future multimode multiband 2G and 3G operation will be a part of the main stream products including wireless LAN, Bluetooth®, GPS and DVB-H as well. Infineon Technologies has focussed its RF expertise on providing the next wave of highly integrated, high performance and easy to use RF CMOS radio subsystems. Infineon Technologies demonstrates the maturity of RF CMOS with respect to RF performance by producing e.g. a six-band WCDMA / UMTS transceiver. The RF CMOS capability enabled the world first single chip cell phone: EGold-Radio. RF-modems will be the next leap in the integration level. These RF-SoCs will simplify the handset development process by separating the radio hardware as well as the protocol stack from the application layer.

Stefan Wolff is Vice president of Infineon Technologies overseeing the company's Cellular RF Engine business unit. Since the early nineties he is involved in RF IC business. After his studies he started his career at Robert Bosch group as RF engineer for Mobile Phones. Later he joined Siemens Semiconductor, where he was responsible for the marketing of RF ICs. Prior to joining Infineon Technologies, Mr. Wolff was heading the San Diego RF design centre of Siemens Mobile Phones.