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Bluetooth® radios are becoming pervasive in small, battery-powered devices. This is being driven by the reduced area requirements, cost, and power consumption of Bluetooth chips. As process technology scales down to 0.13 μm CMOS and beyond, the opportunities to trade off digital complexity to reduce analog requirements can enable optimized radio designs. This article presents an architecture on both the transmitter and receiver that can optimize this digital/analog trade-off while still meeting all system requirements. A polar transmitter is presented that is capable of transmitting both basic rate and enhanced data rate traffic. The low-IF receiver is also optimized, requiring very little analog filtering and using an over sampled analog-to-digital converter to move the filtering burden to the digital domain. The result is the smallest and lowest power Bluetooth radio published to date. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wireless local area networks based on the IEEE 802.11 standard are rapidly replacing wires within homes and offices. The latest datarate amendment to the IEEE 802.11 standard, known as the 802.11n, provides enhanced user experience by exploiting MIMO techniques that use multiple antennas for both transmitter and receiver. In conjunction with MAC layer improvements such as aggregating data, the 802.11n standard supports PHY data rates as high as 600 Mb/s with four spatial streams. This article discusses various MAC and PHY level modifications introduced in 802.11n, as well as the architecture, design trade-offs, and implementation details of a two spatial stream CMOS 802.11n-draft-compliant SoC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]