Design of a Low Voltage-Low Power 3.1–10.6 GHz UWB RF Front-End in a CMOS 65 nm Technology

Abstract

In this brief, the design of a 3.1 to 10.6 GHz ultra wideband (UWB) RF front-end (RFFE) is presented. It employs a novel low noise common gate amplifier combined with a noise canceling circuit, that provides wideband input matching, high voltage gain and low noise figure in the whole band of operation. It also adopts a passive single balanced direct conversion mixer with a custom designed balun at its local oscillator (LO) input. The RFFE achieves 20.6 dB of voltage gain and it has adequately flat frequency response. Its noise figure is 3-3.8 dB and the CP1 at the input is −19.7 dBm. The circuit consumes only 10.8 mW from a 1.2 V supply and it was designed in IBM's CMOS 65 nm process.Index Terms-Common gate, direct conversion mixer, noise cancelling, RF front-end (RFFE), ultra wideband (UWB).

A 2.4 GHz 2.9 mW Zigbee RF Receiver with Current-Reusing and Function-Reused Mixing Techniques

“…However, without a preceding LNA, a high biasing current is needed for generating a relatively high transconductance to suppress the noise contributed by the mixer. In [7][8][9][10], the authors present receivers with state-of-the-art low-power techniques. The power consumption and performance are balanced in consideration of the application scenario.…”

“…However, when an NF less than 4 dB is required, more power consumption is necessary to guarantee high sensitivity. On this occasion, the typical power dissipation can be as high as 10 mW [7].…”

A Dual-Band 2.45/6 GHz CMOS LNA Utilizing a Dual-Resonant Transformer-Based Matching Network

“…Tunable devices, especially those found in the input network, can degrade overall noise performance. There are three ways in which a wideband impedance matching network is typically realized including: using an LC band pass filter at the input [2]- [5], using a common-gate topology [6]- [10], or by using feedback, such as dual reactive feedback [11]- [13], or resistive/source follower feedback [14]- [18]. A wideband response can also be achieved through the use of transformers [19]- [21].…”

Low voltage‐low power full‐band UWB receiver front‐end

“…Because the direct conversion topology does not need an external image‐rejection filter between the low‐noise amplifier (LNA) and the mixer, it is possible to decrease the chip size and the power consumption [1]. Full‐band UWB receivers including the LNA and mixer have been previously studied [2, 3]. In Ref 2,.…”

“…It consumed large amounts of power because it used a source‐follower buffer between the LNA and mixer. In Ref 3,. a RF front‐end was presented with an additional noise cancelling circuit.…”