Performance analysis of a low power low noise tunable band pass filter for multiband RF front end

Abstract

This paper presents a low power tunable active inductor and RF band pass filter suitable for multiband RF front end circuits. The active inductor circuit uses the PMOS cascode structure as the negative transconductor of a gyrator to reduce the noise voltage. Also, this structure provides possible negative resistance to reduce the inductor loss with wide inductive bandwidth and high resonance frequency. The RF band pass filter is realized using the proposed active inductor with suitable input and output buffer stages. The tuning of the center frequency for multiband operation is achieved through the controllable current source. The designed active inductor and RF band pass filter are simulated in 180 nm and 45 nm CMOS process using the Synopsys HSPICE simulation tool and their performances are compared. The parameters, such as resonance frequency, tuning capability, noise and power dissipation, are analyzed for these CMOS technologies and discussed. The design of a third order band pass filter using an active inductor is also presented.

DVCC-based Low-power RF Filter with 32 nm CNFETs

“…Moreover, the power dissipation of filter is 524 µW only. HSPICE simulations confirm the capability of the circuit to work in the Ku-band of frequencies (12)(13)(14)(15)(16)(17)(18). The proposed filter could be a suitable alternative for CMOS-based circuit design in the future.…”

“…The cut-off frequency of the filter is further solved in term of R and C as (8). Now, as the design requires the cut-off frequency is in GHz range (12)(13)(14)(15)(16)(17)(18). Therefore, the value of resistor is consider in KHz range and calculate the capacitor value which is found to be in fF range.…”

“…Additionally, Ku-band is used for satellite communications, mainly for fixed and broadcast based services. It ranges from [12][13][14][15][16][17][18] GHz as per the IEEE Standard [14]. In this work, CMOS-based DVCC is also realized with 32 nm model parameters.…”

“…Various techniques of RF filtering have been described in the literature [3,12,7,18,23]. An active inductor-capacitor based band-pass filter has been presented [12].…”

“…Moreover, a CMOS based high-Q RF filter has been presented [7], which utilizes the Q-enhancing technique over the frequency range of 625 MHz to 1.68 GHz. A PMOS cascode structure has been used as the negative transconductance of a gyrator to reduce noise [18]. The cascode structure was utilized for tunable active RF band-pass filter for the frequency range 3.9 -12.3 GHz.…”