Products
Wireless Components
Kaben Wireless has a history of developing and producing high performance RF and mixed-signal circuit Intellectual Property components in CMOS, RF-CMOS and SiGe Bi-CMOS, for wireless transceivers and high speed optical communications. In particular, Kaben produces a family of synthesizers providing the best phase noise and spur level performance in the industry, a family of tunable, integrated (on-die) IF filters providing selectable center frequencies, bandwidths, and adjacent channel rejection performance, and a family of Digital-to-RF converters that avoid the problems associated with an analog baseband signal.
These components are offered as stand alone Intellectual Property cores, ready for integration into a customer’s host chip. They also form the bases of Kaben’s Intellectual Property systems offerings, such as its FM/AM tuner, cable modem, Bluetooth transceiver, GPS receiver, and other wide band transceivers.
Wireless Systems
Kaben Wireless has exceptionally strong transceiver design capability. This capability ranges from RF front-end architecture selection and design, through back-end DSP for timing, equalization, and filtering.
Kaben’s philosophy in system design focuses on reintroducing the super heterodyne architecture, with all of its inherent advantages, by utilizing our unique tunable, integrated IF filter capability. The use of a heterodyne architecture relaxes the dynamic range and bandwidth requirements on the receiver A/Ds and reduces the degree (and latency) of back-end digital filtering required. Further, since the tunable IF filter is actually a sampled IF, finite impulse response filter, it provides the second down-conversion and A/D conversion, thereby avoiding all issues associated with DC offset and IP2 levels.
For low carrier frequency signals such as FM broadcast, direct conversion to digital is provided by the tunable, integrated IF filter, including all aspects of RF filtering, down-conversion, and A/D conversion.
Kaben’s methodology for OFDM, focuses on driving the front-end heterodyne architecture with ultra clean synthesizers, to minimize any EVM due to additive noise or spur levels. In the transmitter, the use of the unique Digital-to-IF converter avoids complex (I and Q) up-converters, thereby eliminating amplitude and phase balance correction circuits.
Kaben is uniquely positioned to exploit the strengths of its high performance components (tunable filters, ultra clean synthesizers, and Digital-to-IF converters). This systems strength has culminated in Kaben’s family of Intellectual Property systems offering.
Timing Products
Kaben’s All-Digital Fractional-N PLL synthesizers provide ultra-low phase noise performance and ultra-low in-band spurious emissions, in a significantly reduced die area compared with conventional fractional-N synthesizer architectures. This size reduction is achieved through the use of all-digital FIR filters in … Continue reading
Reconfigurable Receivers and Transceivers
Software defined radios promise to provide one transceiver capable of handling multiple wireless standards, ranging from Bluetooth, to GSM, to WiMax. Although most of the functionality of modulation / demodulation, synchronization, channel equalization, etc. can be performed in the software … Continue reading
SIF ADC – IF Digitizer
The KWS800 is a high dynamic range IF digitizer that monolithically unites a programmable filter to an ADC. This companion sampled IF (SIF) filter provides anti-aliasing for the internal ADC core while simultaneously offering application-specific filtering needed to address a … Continue reading
D/A Converters (DIF) Digital to IF Converters
Kaben’s Digital to IF Converters and D/A Converters are ideal for Wireless Communications products such as Bluetooth, WLAN 802.11a, 802.11b, 802.11g, and Cable Modems. These cells are designed for low power transmitters employing complex modulation formats such as Orthogonal Frequency … Continue reading
Δ∑ PLL Synthesizers
With synthesizer designs encompassing Integer-N, Fractional-N, and Delta-Sigma Fractional-N, Kaben can deliver the right drop-in for any SoC requirement. The cells are tailored for applications that require low power consumption, excellent phase noise, fine step size, low spurious, and fast … Continue reading
Sampling IF Filters (SIF)
The Sampling IF (SIF) filter in the receiver actually performs several operations simultaneously. Its principal function is to provide channel select filtering. In addition, the SIF provides image reject filtering, anti-aliasing filtering, AGC, sampling, and digitization. The SIFs have an … Continue reading
Programmable IF Strip (PIFS)
The Kaben Programmable IF Strip (PIFS) CMOS chip reduces the component count in a wireless receiver, while enhancing performance and enabling programmability. The PIFS provides SAW like frequency selectivity, without the need of external SAWs. This enables high performance front-ends … Continue reading