We are approaching an age of IoT, in which sensors and controllers in all types of devices, including smart phones and PCs, are connected together. The strongest candidate for a wireless interface is the Bluetooth Low Energy® (BLE) standard because it is already widely used in smart phones. Many markets, especially for wearable devices like smart watches, demand BLE devices with a small module area and low current consumption. In previous research, solutions to the requirements for BLE have been widely discussed such as using the sliding IF (SIF) architecture in the RX [1,2] and a Class-D amplifier [2] with HD2 calibration [4] in the TX to achieve lower current consumption. The SIF architecture, however, involves RF image blocking violation without exception rule or the use of additional off-chip filters. In the TX, meanwhile, the calibration incurs a weakness in terms of the offset issue. Moreover, there is no approach to achieve "zero" external components for the RF port. In this paper, a BLE transceiver, with a reconfigurable filter, embedded into an on-chip matching network without any external components, is presented.

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A single-stage RF programmable gain amplifier (RF-PGA) in 65-nm CMOS is presented. The RF-PGA consists of thermometer-weighted transconductors and binary-weighted transconductors with an R-2R ladder. The transmitter prototype with the single-stage RF-PGA achieves 78 dB dynamic range, 0.27 dB accuracy in 1dB step at 1950 MHz. The measured transmitter noise in RX band is -160.4 dBc/Hz. The ACLR and EVM with LTE modulated signal (BW=20 MHz) are -40 dBc and 3.4 %, respectively.