A Blocker-Tolerant Inductor-Less Wideband Receiver With Phase and Thermal Noise Cancellation

Abstract

A wideband receiver architecture with simultaneous phase and thermal noise cancellation greatly relaxes the traditional trade-offs between noise, out-of-band linearity, LO phase noise and power consumption. The architecture employs thermal noise cancelling and avoids voltage gain at blocker frequencies, and exploits the symmetry of phase noise to cancel the reciprocal mixing products in the presence of either single-tone or modulated blockers. The resulting design in 28 nm CMOS has 2 dB noise figure from 100 MHz to 2.8 GHz. Without using any inductors on-chip including the RF VCO, the receiver's NF is below 14 dB under either a 0 dB CW blocker or a -10 dBm WCDMA blocker.