Abstract
This paper presents a K u -band RF receiver front-end with broadband impedance matching and amplification. The major building blocks of the proposed receiver front-end include a wideband low-noise amplifier (LNA) employing a cascade of resistive feedback inverter (RFI) and transformer-loaded common source amplifier, a down-conversion mixer with push–pull transconductor and complementary LO switching stage, and an output buffer. Push–pull architecture is employed extensively to maximize the power efficiency, bandwidth, and linearity. The proposed two-stage LNA employs the stagger-tuned frequency response in order to extend the RF bandwidth coverage. The input impedance of RFI is carefully analyzed, and a wideband input matching circuit incorporating only a single inductor is presented along with useful equivalent impedance matching models and detailed design analysis. The prototype chip was fabricated in 45-nm CMOS technology and dissipates 78 mW from a 1.2-V supply while occupying chip area of 0.29 mm 2 . The proposed receiver front-end provides 21 dB conversion gain with 7 GHz IF bandwidth, 3.5 dB NF, −15.7 dBm IIP 3 while satisfying <−10 dB input matching over the whole input band.
Highlights
Many wireless communication standards have evolved, and continue to do so, in the millimeter-wave regime to accommodate an ever-increasing demand for various applications such as 5G communications, corresponding to which the number of devices is increasing, resulting in communication under heavily congested spectrum
The proposed system consists of an low-noise amplifier (LNA) with both wideband input matching and signal amplification, an on-chip passive BALUN for single-ended to differential signal conversion along with action as a load of LNA, and down-conversion mixer
A minor difference was observed in Zin between the MATLAB simulation and actual design, which can be attributed to the unaccounted parasitics and first-order approximations made in evaluating the input admittance of resistive feedback inverter (RFI)
Summary
Many wireless communication standards have evolved, and continue to do so, in the millimeter-wave regime to accommodate an ever-increasing demand for various applications such as 5G communications, corresponding to which the number of devices is increasing, resulting in communication under heavily congested spectrum. The implementation of broadband sensing device is a difficult task with the major hurdles being the design of broadband amplifier and local oscillator (LO) signal synthesizer. The system uses two-stage, narrow band cascode LNA topology, which requires a large number of inductors to achieve good input match along with high gain. This work, as the core building block of RF channelization receiver in [2], aims at the design and implementation of an extremely wideband RF front-end covering 10–20 GHz broad input bandwidth (which includes the whole Ku -band) driven by GHz local oscillator (LO) signal to donwconvert the input RF band to IF (intermediate frequency) with good dynamic range performance.
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