Customer Reviews

The Design of CMOS Radio-Frequency Integrated Circuits

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

If you're looking for a book on CMOS design this is not it. An excellent choice would be the book by Gray and Meyer. If you're looking for a book on RF design this is not it either. Unfortunately there is no definitive text on RF design. For RF system concepts I like 'Radio Communications Concepts: Analog' by Ralph Carson. For a good intro to S-parameters and matching take a look at 'Microwave Transistor Amplifiers' by Gonzales. For in-depth treatment try 'Microwave and RF Circuits: Analysis, Synthesis and Design' by Max Medley, but be warned this one is very math intensive and assumes a good knowledge of network theory. For some good RF cookbook circuits get Vizmuller's, 'RF Design Guide'. I've yet to find a good overall treatment of nonlinear circuits.

So what is this book? If you are familiar with discrete RF design and have a knowledge of CMOS analog design this book helps you tie the two together for high frequency RFIC design. Although the level of detail is a little thin the chapters on high frequency amplifiers and other RF circuits are very useful and cover some topologies and concepts that are not commonly found in other books.

The value in this text is that it presents an overview of many different ways to arrive at the RF blocks of a transceiver in CMOS and presents the tradeoffs and limitations of each.

The book would have been better if the review material on CMOS and voltage/current references were left out since they are covered in very little detail and there are many other texts that do a better job on those topics. I would have preferred more detail on the high freqeuncy integrated architectures which are the forte of this book.

I consider it a good purchase.

Possibly the most well-written book on CMOS design I have ever read. Relaxed, readable style and an emphasis on core ideas and rule-of-thumb design rules, makes this an extremely useful practical guide, as well as a great introduction to a complex topic. Some excellent advanced material on oscillator design too. I particularly liked the first and last chapters giving a history of radio design - very interesting background. I think the best compliment I can give this book is that I found it difficult to put down - for a circuits textbook, that is truly an incredible achievement!

I am an analog / mixed signal / signal processing / RF engineer with 30+ years of design experience. A friend of mine lent me the book. I could not put it down! This book was not purchased with with the expectation of designing RF ICs, hence my minor dig on the title. The book is really a broad band reference covering a wide range of topics including some great history. Professor Lee has created a reference that is only outdone by the likes of Frederick Terman! His humor is also keenly appreciated. The rest of the ivory-tower stuffed-shirts could benefit from a lecture or two by Lee on this topic :-)

This book was used for an upper level graduate course at my university. Unfortunately, all of the homeworks used questions from this textbook, and we were not able to complete ANY of them using the analysis (or lack there of) covered in this text. We struggled to find answers in this book, but eventually found the answers using other textbooks or notes we gained from other professors and classes.

This goes to highlight the troubling situation in RF analysis: There is NO good textbook that covers this area, but there are many textbooks that are good in certain aspects of RF design. Lee focus's entirely too much on theory and intuition, and never enough on actual practice and calculations. At one point, to get away from actually deriving an answer (which my class has become convinced that he does not know how to do) he simply says "since this is not a book on circuit theory, we will not go into the derivations here but leave it to the reader". This kind of attitude is not acceptable when learning electronics, and the kind of "trial and error" practice promoted by his kind of teaching will not produce any real engineers without the aid of another textbook or course.

The first chapter of this book gives a history of radio design with schematics. The cmos portion gives a good coverage of RF components, smith charts, CMOS inductors, Bandwidth estimation techniques etc. More an RF issues book than a cmos layout book with almost all layout examples being single components. This is an excellent single issue book focused on Radio design specifically CMOS radio design. Those looking for a book focused on CMOS design should buy this book in addition to another.

This book covers many areas within RFIC design from component
level to system level. It's not the book for someone who wants
to dig deep into theory. I don't think that the average university student would like to use this book as a text book either because it covers to many topics and has to few examples.

For an practicing engineer who quickly want's to get some breif
understanding of RFIC and RF design this is the right book,
easy to read, easy to find chapters about different technologies and building blocks.

The best with this book is the chapters about and references to the history of radio electronics.

I have enjoyed reading this book. It has a writing style that keeps your interest and covers a wide variety of RF topics in a manner that is easy to understand. He covers microwave topics of s-parameters and smith charts and ciruit topics of LNAs, mixers, power amplifiers, and transceiver architectures. He also covers the sytems level wireless standards. I personally like the sections on power amplifiers, LNAs and mixers.

Sincerely,
Stan Goldman RF IC Design Engineer, [...]
Phase-Locked Loops Engineering Handbook for Integrated Circuits

A good book on RF Design techniques. Prof. Lee was also the instructor when I took this class at Stanford, and his style of writing and teaching made the learning all the more interesting. Although I don't actively work in the design of RF circuits, still find it a good reference.

Looking through the table of contents of this book and reading the reviews, one is tempted to think that this book will answer a lot of questions on RF design. Unfortunately, it falls very short. This is a gentle introduction to RF design and lacks enough depth to interest a serious RF designer. Several of the important equations and results are simply stated without a fair level of mathematical rigor and that does leave an empty feeling. I gave it two stars because it does cover a broad range of topics and also explains (with it's usual lack of depth) the Hajimiri-Lee phase noise theory. Don't expect to become an expert on RF IC design after reading this book. A better book would be Razavi's Design of Analog CMOS ICs.

This book presents the material in a conversational manner. The strength of this book is that it includes many important, rarely discussed topics. It also contains an interesting history of Radio Frequency Circuits. However it needs more examples and a more extensive listing of its references.