A dual‐band receiver front‐end using current‐mode passive mixer with digitally‐controlled oscillator in 90‐NM CMOS

Abstract

AbstractThis work presents a receiver front‐end that targets mobile video applications, and integrates a dual‐band LNA, a current‐mode passive mixer, a reference Gilbert mixer, and a digitally‐controlled oscillator providing the quadrature LO signal for the mixers. The conversion gain and thermal noise performances of the current‐mode passive mixer are studied. Design tradeoffs among noise, linearity, and conversion gain are performed. Measured performance of the receiver front‐end shows a flicker noise corner of 70 kHz, a noise figure (NF) of 4.4 dB, an input third‐order intermodulation product (IIP3) of −2 dBm, and DCO phase noise of −128 dBc/Hz at 1‐MHz offset. The receiver consumes less than 24 mA of current in a 1.2‐V 90‐nm standard digital CMOS process. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 50: 2138–2142, 2008; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/mop.23587