Monolithic SDR SoC for SATCOM

Communication SoC technology has advanced significantly over the past ten years resulting in highly integrated radio SoC chips for standards. While most radio SoC’s are narrowband (e.g. Wi-Fi, GNSS, Globalstar, BT, and cellular), future trends favor wideband software defined radios (SDR).  SDR promises to enable low-cost integrated miniaturized multi-standard radios for commercial as well as military applications. However, current SDR chips are either RF-only solutions or integrated but consume large amounts of power (e.g., 5-20W). In this SBIR, the feasibility of implementing a monolithic SDR system-on-chip (SoC) for satellite communications (SATCOM) will be investigated using deep sub-micron complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) process to leverage digital processing and simply traditional RF transceiver architecture capable of software configuration for multi-standard operation for not only SATCOM (e.g., Globalstar, and GNSS) but also other standards such as Wi-Fi, BT, and 5G LTE over 0.1GHz-6GHz in a small footprint and less than 1W power consumption.