Research and Analysis of Tunable Differential N-Path Band-Pass Filter

Abstract

Traditional filters usually have low Q and gain values and it is difficult to adjust their center frequencies. Moreover, it is very complicated to analyze their transmission charateristics through conventional methods. Therefore, in this paper, a tunable differential N-path bandpass filter that uses a new adjoint network method to analyze the transmission characteristics of the differential N-path structure is proposed. The filter circuit adopts a novel circuit structure consisting of two differential N-path structures, two transconductance amplifiers and an off-chip transformer. The differential structure eliminates even harmonics, the transconductance amplifier increases the circuit gain and the off-chip transformer acts as a balun, improving the filter’s Q value and achieving impedance matching. Unlike the traditional switching capacitance method used for analyzing the differential circuit structure, the method proposed in this paper does not involve complicated calculus operations. In fact, the method greatly simplifies these complex operations, and the transmission function of the circuit can be obtained through simple algebraic operations. The proposed filter was designed using TSMC 180[Formula: see text]nm CMOS process. Simulation results for a differential four-path bandpass filter formed under 1.2[Formula: see text]V supply voltage show that the gain of the filter is greater than 8.5 dB, the center frequency can be adjusted from 0.1[Formula: see text]GHz to 1[Formula: see text]GHz, the in-band insertion loss S11 is greater than 10 dB, the out-of-band IIP3 is greater than 10 dBm, the out-of-band rejection is 28 dB and the noise figure is less than 2.2 dB at [Formula: see text][Formula: see text]MHz.

Design of a High-Gain N-path Filter with Harmonic Rejection

“…In order to compensate for the insertion loss of the N-path filter and make it more suitable for applications such as receiver front-end, adding LNA to the front-end of the N-path filter is a good choice. This not only compensates for insertion loss, but also provides a certain positive gain for the N-path filter [19,20].…”