Kaben Wireless Announces New IF Digitizer

KWS-800 Family of ADCs to Have Built-in IF and Anti-Aliasing Filtering

OTTAWA, ON - April 18, 2011 - Kaben Wireless Silicon Inc. ("Kaben") an industry leading provider of high performance mixed-signal IP, announced today a new family of ADC products with built-in filtering.

Kaben today announced their new family of IF Digitizers. "The KWS-800 SIF ADC combines Kaben's patented Sampled IF (SIF) Filter technology to a new line of performance ADCs. The programmability of our precision, on-chip filter, combined with the ADC, facilitates reconfigurable radio design and enables SoC manufacturers to integrate multimode receivers onto a single IC" said Bill Bereza, Kaben's Director of Marketing. He further added "System engineers will have programmable control over the filter's characteristics, including center frequency, bandwidth, passband ripple, transition band and stopband attenuation".

Kaben's patented SIF filter is widely recognized for having sharp transition bands typically seen in SAW filters without insertion loss or group delay variations.

Currently Analog to Digital Converters (ADC) convert analog baseband signals to digital baseband or subsample and convert IF signals to baseband. However, ADCs require anti-alias filtering because a sampled input signal must be band limited to prevent folding of interferers and noise near multiples of the sampling frequency. Until now, integrating high quality on-chip filters has been a major issue. Kaben has created a new type of product by combining the functions of data conversion and precision filtering.

With three SIF ADC products to choose from, customers can select an ADC with 14 bits of resolution having sampling frequencies of 80 or 120 MHz, or 10 bits at 400 MHz. The filter type can be programmed to be either lowpass or bandpass. The filter center frequency, bandwidth, passband ripple, transition band and stopband attenuation are all programmable using a serial interface.

The SIF ADC uses Kaben's proprietary Sampled IF Filtering technology based on charge-domain signal processing and interleaving to process and digitize high-frequency input signals. Combined, they offer a very high dynamic range due to Kaben's patented technology. Combining the SIF filter and ADC eliminates challenges associated with the interface between the RF and the mixed-signal domains.

"We solved the issue of having limited dynamic range in an ADC by working in charge packets rather than voltage, which enables us to bypass the issues imposed by a low voltage." said Tom Riley, Kaben's CTO. "The result is that we are able to duplicate the high dynamic range of a 5 volt system when we are working with a 1 volt supply." 

About Kaben Wireless, Inc.

Kaben Wireless Silicon Inc is a semiconductor development organization for wireless and wireline communications systems addressing next generation communication standards. We develop circuits and systems for frequency generation and timing products, integrated reconfigurable tuners for software-defined radio, programmable on-chip filters, RF/Analog front ends and systems for proprietary and standards-based applications. Kaben delivers high-performance designs to manufacturers in the wireless and wireline communications market, that significantly reduce risk, cost, and time to market. For more information, please visit www.kabenwireless.com.