PROJECT TITLE :

Integrated circuits for communications [Series Editorial]

ABSTRACT:

During this issue of Integrated Circuits for Communications, we have selected 2 articles that mark recent progress within the communications semiconductor trade that is enabling digital implementation of communication systems on chip (SoCs). Prior to the late 1980s, communications circuits were mainly analog, and so were the corresponding systems that used them. These systems include the National Television System Committee (NTSC) analog tv, the analog cellular Advanced Mobile Phone System (AMPS), and of course previous analog radio broadcasting. But, ever since the introduction of the complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) in the first Seventies, the communications circuit landscape began to evolve. Advances in CMOS enabled at the outset the mixing of thousands of logic gates per square millimeter to at gift tens of million per square millimeter in deep sub-micron technology nodes. This level of integration follows the well-known Moore's Law, that has successfully predicted in the past forty years that the quantity of transistors in an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years.