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The Design of CMOS Radio-Frequency Integrated Circuits Thomas H. Lee Cambridge University Press, England ISBN 0 521 83539 9 797 + xviii pp., 20 ch. Hardback (185×260×42 mm) Price GBP 45.00 USD 75.00
Keywords CMOS, Integrated circuits, Design, Books
It must be said from the start that the subject of this book is marginal to this journal, although there is some overlap. When I first saw the cover illustration - a 0.18 µm CMOS transceiver die in the 5-6 GHz bands - (Plate 1) and title, I imagined that it was going to be a rather dry "how- to" work on driving the CAD system for the actual die production. I was totally wrong. It is a fully fledged engineering book, going back to first principles, and a good one, at that. Despite being full of equations (many of which were beyond my understanding, having done my RF engineering studies when UHF was still an adventure with such things as Barkhausen oscillators and microwaves were essentially klystrons and pulsed magnetrons for radar), the author's style is easy to read and even quite humorous.
I was very much at home in the opening two chapters, which were in the form of a brief historical survey of RF communications from the spark transmitter through to third-generation mobile handsets. In fact, it was fascinating reading, as it took me back to the spark transmitters and crystal sets I made as a kid! I found it instructive, too. For example, I didn't know that the first solid-state RF amplifiers and oscillators, using a zinc mineral as semiconductor, date back to 1922, a quarter of a century before the transistor saw the light of day. This was the work of a Soviet engineer, one Oleg Losev. Even less did I know that Henry J. Round published a paper describing orange, yellow and even blue LEDs in ... 1907, yes, nearly a century ago. He used carborundum (silicon carbide) as his semiconductor. When...