by Debra Vogler, Senior Technical Editor

As cell phone demand surges in emerging markets, IBM says it is seizing the last significant opportunity to reduce cell phones’ cost and size by developing a low cost, integrated solution with multiple RF/analog functions on a single chip. IBM technologists explain to SST how this is being accomplished by replacing GaAs with SOI.

The logic portion (i.e., baseband) of chipsets for cell phones and other mobile communications applications has benefited from scaling, and the radio portion is already down the path of integration (going from exotic technologies to BiCMOS, SiGe, and RF CMOS). But integration has not yet found its way into the last portion, from the radio out