A low-voltage design technique for RF integrated circuits

Abstract

We report an integrated RF circuit topology that can be used to realize low voltage (i.e., 1 V) RF integrated circuits. The scheme uses on-chip capacitively coupled resonating elements to DC isolate circuit elements that under the present art are connected in series and share a common DC current. The topology is applied to several commonly used RF integrated circuit topologies (i.e., low-noise amplifiers and mixers). A comparison is made between a low-voltage version of a cascode amplifier and the classic cascode amplifier. The low-voltage version (i.e., 1 V) is shown to have a similar distortion specification as the classic 2 V low-noise cascode amplifier. The low-voltage version has a 0.22 dB improvement in noise figure.