STTR Phase I: Frequency Agile Reconfigurable WWAN/WPAN Radio Design

This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase I project will model, design, simulate, develop and transition to industrial partners the key elements of Frequency Agile Reconfigurable Radios that incorporate both medium-data-rate wireless wide area network (WWAN) radios and ultra-high-data-rate short-range wireless personal area network (WPAN) radios. Demand for wireless data will soon outstrip available RF spectrum. While limited new spectrum is available, the complexity of wireless device RF front ends is already daunting and adding more RF bands will just add more switches and more surface- acoustic-wave (SAW) filters. In the near term, the Frequency agile aspect of the proposed work will enable RF front ends that can cover the entire spectrum from 0.8GHz - 5GHz with only 3 RF front ends. This research focuses on the design of tunable LC filters coupled with adaptive cancelation of transmit tone leakage and the design of high efficiency watt-level power amplifiers. Finally, the potential for peer-to-peer ad-hoc wireless networking to provide auxiliary access to large data files of common interest will be assessed; and, a short range 60GHz transceiver front end will be designed such that the overall radio can be rapidly reconfigured to operate between 0.8-5GHz or at 60GHz. The broader impact/commercial potential of this project is that a frequency agile RF front end architecture can dramatically improve the cost and performance of wireless front ends by allowing a single transceiver and tunable RF Filter to cover any frequency band within an entire octave of frequency. An early payoff for the project will be the reduction in the number of RF switches and RF filters in the front end of wireless devices, especially cellular phones. As the number of distinct frequency bands that must be addressed by modern cell phones increases, their cost increases and their RF performance decreases because the on/off impedance ratio of available RF switches is small. The frequency agile RF front end will improve the RF performance of cellular phones due to decreased RF switch losses. This would simplify the government?s process to issue new frequency bands without considering radio complexity. The long term commercial potential for the project is its ability to dramatically reduce the data that travels over the WWAN by facilitating high data rate ad-hoc networks between mobile devices using a WPAN radio.