The silicon radio decade

During the 1990s, we witnessed a string of advances in silicon RF integration: from the introduction of the first integrated silicon bipolar radios for groupe special mobile and digital European cordless telephone in the late 1980s toward full single-chip integration capabilities based on silicon-germanium BiCMOS technologies. Where RF design used to be a black art, it is becoming a ``normal practice{''} today. In this paper, the authors are looking back on then years of circuits, silicon technology, and system research with roots in standardization and a scope reaching from the early ideas to the final product success on the market and some perspective toward new concepts and systems. The past decade was a turbulent period with new technologies popping up, dreams of RF CMOS gradually coming to reality, products in bipolar and GaAs and conferences crowded with RF papers. Too many to read or reread, but we summarize here what we remember still clearly after ten years and we try to look ahead in the near future.