Murata Joins imec Research Platform on Reconfigurable Radios

Imec and Murata Manufacturing Co., Ltd. announce that they have entered into a three-year research collaboration on reconfigurable radio IC design.

By joining forces, Murata will gain insight and better understanding in technology solutions and challenges for cognitive reconfigurable radio front-end. This will enable them to better assess the impact on antenna interface components. Murata’s expertise on components and system will fuel imec’s research towards fully reconfigurable radios.

“Imec was chosen as R&D partner because of its longstanding expertise and excellent track-record in reconfigurable radio IC design,” said Norio Nakajima, vice president Module Business Unit at Murata. “We hope that this collaboration with imec will give us insight into the technology and design challenges for next-generation reconfigurable radios. This is important to leverage our vast know-how in antenna interface components and to identify new opportunities for next generation front-end modules.”

“We are excited with this agreement with Murata, as it emphasizes the prominent role of imec as R&D centre in reconfigurable radio design,” stated Liesbet Van der Perre, director of the green radio programs, “With our R&D program on reconfigurable radios, we gather industrial players from across the value chain, to jointly develop next-generation reconfigurable radios. By combining fundamental rethinking of the circuit architectures and designs, and clever use of the benefits of deeply scaled digital CMOS technologies, we aim to develop reconfigurable radio transceivers competitive in terms of area, cost, performance and power consumption. The transceivers will cover all key broadband communication standards including LTE and LTE advanced, digital broadcasting and next-generation WiFi (802.11n/ac).”