Kaben Wireless Silicon

Wireless Components

Kaben Wireless has a history of developing and producing high performance RF and mixed-signal circuit Intellectual Property components in CMOS, RF-CMOS and SiGe Bi-CMOS, for wireless transceivers and high speed optical communications.  In particular, Kaben produces a family of synthesizers providing the best phase noise and spur level performance in the industry, a family of tunable, integrated (on-die) IF filters providing selectable center frequencies, bandwidths, and adjacent channel rejection performance, and a family of Digital-to-RF converters that avoid the problems associated with an analog baseband signal.

These components are offered as stand alone Intellectual Property cores, ready for integration into a customer's host chip. They also form the bases of Kaben's Intellectual Property systems offerings, such as its FM/AM tuner, cable modem, Bluetooth transceiver, GPS receiver, and other wide band transceivers.

Wireless Systems

Kaben Wireless has exceptionally strong transceiver design capability. This capability ranges from RF front-end architecture selection and design, through back-end DSP for timing, equalization, and filtering.

Kaben's philosophy in system design focuses on reintroducing the super heterodyne architecture, with all of its inherent advantages, by utilizing our unique tunable, integrated IF filter capability. The use of a heterodyne architecture relaxes the dynamic range and bandwidth requirements on the receiver A/Ds and reduces the degree (and latency) of back-end digital filtering required. Further, since the tunable IF filter is actually a sampled IF, finite impulse response filter, it provides the second down-conversion and A/D conversion, thereby avoiding all issues associated with DC offset and IP2 levels.

For low carrier frequency signals such as FM broadcast, direct conversion to digital is provided by the tunable, integrated IF filter, including all aspects of RF filtering, down-conversion, and A/D conversion.

Kaben's methodology for OFDM, focuses on driving the front-end heterodyne architecture with ultra clean synthesizers, to minimize any EVM due to additive noise or spur levels. In the transmitter, the use of the unique Digital-to-IF converter avoids complex (I and Q) up-converters, thereby eliminating amplitude and phase balance correction circuits.

Kaben is uniquely positioned to exploit the strengths of its high performance components (tunable filters, ultra clean synthesizers, and Digital-to-IF converters). This systems strength has culminated in Kaben's family of Intellectual Property systems offering.