A low power dual-band multi-mode RF front-end for GNSS applications

Abstract

A CMOS dual-band multi-mode RF front-end for the global navigation satellite system receivers of all GPS, Bei-Dou, Galileo and Glonass systems is presented. It consists of a reconfigurable low noise amplifier (LNA), a broadband active balun, a high linearity mixer and a bandgap reference (BGR) circuit. The effect of the input parasitic capacitance on the input impedance of the inductively degenerated common source LNA is analyzed in detail. By using two different LC networks at the input port and the switched capacitor at the output port, the LNA can work at two different frequency bands (1.2 GHz and 1.5 GHz) under low power consumption. The active balun uses a hybrid-connection structure to achieve high bandwidth. The mixer uses the multiple gated transistors technique to acquire a high linearity under low power consumption but does not deteriorate other performances. The measurement results of the proposed front-end achieve a noise figure of 2.1/2.0 dB, again of 33.9/33.8 dB and an input 1-dB compression point of 0/1 dBm at 1227.6/1575.42 MHz. The power consumption is about 16 mW under a 1.8 V power supply.