Programmable power-efficient front end for wired and wireless communication

Abstract

A front-end used for processing communication signals in a received path including an antenna cable segment that receives the communication signals. A RF segment provides mixing and filtering of the received signals, the RF segment outputs a first set of signals. An analog baseband segment performs low pass filtering and digitizes the first set of signals in order to input a second set of signals for further processing. The RF segment and the analog baseband segment includes a selective set of components that are power programmable, such that the power consumption of the selective set of components are controlled by bias currents delivered to each of the selective components. In another embodiment, the components of a transmit path are also power programmable via bias current. In another embodiment, the ADCs and DACs of a receive and transmit paths are power programmable via bias current and reconfigurable blocks of ADC and DAC cores.