Tokyo, June 14, 2007 - NEC Corporation and NEC Electronics Corporation have succeeded in developing fundamental technology for intellectual property (IP) cores used in wireless transceivers. The new technologies enable embedding of IP cores into system LSIs for wireless systems, and facilitate CMOS technology scaling of such LSIs. As a result, customers will benefit from reduced system costs and power consumption for next generation wireless technology solutions used in ubiquitous networks, which can only be realized by wireless IP digitization.

Features of the newly-developed technologies:

(1) Development of new technology that combines multiple digital signals with various phases and amplitudes realizes lower distortion of radio frequency (RF) signals. Applying this technology to transmitter modulators and power amplifiers in a wireless IP core eliminates the need for expensive external components to reduce output signal distortion, which helps lower total system costs for wireless transceiver systems. Furthermore, the new technology will contribute to the shortening of wireless IP design periods as it enables the fine tuning of wireless IP, even after chip fabrication, through optimization of the RF signal distortion which is achieved by controlling the digital signal phase.

(2) Development of technology to enable direct demodulation of digital data by comparing the sampled RF signals received in a wireless IP core and technology to vary sampling frequency according to the wireless communication environment. Conventionally, a wireless receiver circuit is operated continuously while it is receiving data. However, by applying this technology, the operation period of receiver circuits can be shortened, and power consumption reduced, as it allows adaptation to the communication environment Test chip evaluation has shown that the power is reduced by up to a tenth of that of similar communication chips.