Kaben Wireless KWS-800 Family of ADCs to Have Built-in IF and Anti-Aliasing Filtering


April 18, 2011 -- Kaben Wireless Silicon, Inc. announced today a new family of ADC intellectual property (IP) products with built-in filtering.

"The KWS-800 SIF ADC combines Kaben's patented Sampled IF (SIF) Filter technology to a new line of performance ADCs. The programmability of our precision, on-chip filter, combined with the ADC, facilitates reconfigurable radio design and enables SOC manufacturers to integrate multimode receivers onto a single IC," said Bill Bereza, Kaben's Director of Marketing. "System engineers will have programmable control over the filter's characteristics, including center frequency, bandwidth, passband ripple, transition band and stopband attenuation".

Currently, ADCs convert analog baseband signals to digital baseband or subsample and convert IF signals to baseband. However, ADCs require anti-alias filtering because a sampled input signal must be band-limited to prevent folding of interferers and noise near multiples of the sampling frequency. Because integrating high-quality on-chip filters has been a major issue. Kaben has created a new type of product by combining the functions of data conversion and precision filtering.

With three SIF ADC products to choose from, designers can select an ADC with 14bits of resolution having sampling frequencies of 80 or 120MHz, or 10bits at 400MHz. The filter type can be programmed to be either lowpass or bandpass. The filter center frequency, bandwidth, passband ripple, transition band and stopband attenuation are all programmable using a serial interface.

The SIF ADC uses Kaben's proprietary Sampled IF Filtering technology based on charge-domain signal processing and interleaving to process and digitize high-frequency input signals. Combined, they offer a very high dynamic rangey. Combining the SIF filter and ADC eliminates challenges associated with the interface between the RF and the mixed-signal domains.

"We solved the issue of having limited dynamic range in an ADC by working in charge packets rather than voltage, which enables us to bypass the issues imposed by a low voltage." said Tom Riley, Kaben's CTO. "The result is that we are able to duplicate the high dynamic range of a 5-volt system when we are working with a 1-volt supply."


Reprinted from SOCcentral.com, your first stop for ASIC, FPGA, EDA, and IP news and design information.
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