1. Purpose and scope
At radio frequencies the passive structures are part of the circuit. An inductor's quality factor sets an oscillator's phase noise, a transformer's coupling sets an amplifier's bandwidth and efficiency, and a transmission line's loss sets the noise figure of a receiver. Ideal components in a schematic hide all of this. The co-design stage designs circuits and passives together: each passive is drawn, solved electromagnetically and turned into a model, and the circuit is simulated with that model until the block meets its specification across corners.
The stage also covers the digital control and calibration around the RF blocks: the register map, the control interface, the calibration loops and their state machines, which follow the usual digital design and verification flow. It ends at the circuit and EM design review, after which layout is committed.
This guide does not cover the full layout of the die, which follows in the next stage, but it does cover the layout of every passive and critical structure, because these must be drawn before they can be modelled.
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