Radio Frequency IC Products

RF CMOS products are in principle part of analog, mixed-signal IC products; RF ICs together with analog, mixed-signal contribute to about 15% of the total semiconductor products in the global market. In engineering practice, due to the specific nature, such as RF products in general operating at much higher frequency of 500 MHz and up to today’s 300 GHz, RF IC products are therefore listed in a separate catalog. Widely used in wireless communications (e.g., cellular networks, Bluetooth, ZigBee, Wi-Fi, GPS, etc.), RF IC products are commonly found in applications of mobile phones, IoT networking (e.g., RF ID), automotive radar, and many others. Typical RF CMOS IC includes RF power amplifier (PA), RF switch, low-noise amplifier (LNA), RF Mixer, Oscillator, Duplexer, and Filter; other RF products include microwave (MW) devices, millimeter (MM) wave devices, and terahertz (THz) devices. This chapter introduces commonly used commercial RF CMOS IC products and RF devices, their basic functions, features, applications, and some typical product names.