A 0.9–1.4-GHz Q-Enhanced CMOS Tunable Bandpass Filter With Constant Fractional Bandwidth and Two Transmission Zeros

Abstract

A tunable differential <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$Q$</tex-math> </inline-formula> -enhanced bandpass filter covering 0.9–1.4 GHz with constant fractional bandwidth (FBW) is proposed using 40-nm CMOS technology in this letter. The proposed filter is constructed by two resonators which consist of on-chip integrated inductors and varactors. The inductors of the two resonators are placed close to each other to form the mainline magnetic coupling of the filter. Besides the mainline coupling, the source port and load port are connected directly by capacitors, forming the source-to-load coupling. With the proposed structure, two transmission zeros (TZs) can be obtained, which can greatly increase the stopband rejection. Meanwhile, nMOS cross-coupled pairs are used as the <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$Q$</tex-math> </inline-formula> -enhanced cells to reduce the insertion loss (IL) and further improve the filter selectivity. A filter prototype based on 40-nm CMOS process is fabricated to validate the proposed structure. The center frequency (CF) of the proposed filter can be tuned from 0.9 to 1.4 GHz while keeping the FBW constant at 8%.