A monolithic 3.1–4.8 GHz MB-OFDM UWB transceiver in 0.18-μm CMOS

Abstract

A monolithic RF transceiver for an MB-OFDM UWB system in 3.1–4.8 GHz is presented. The transceiver adopts direct-conversion architecture and integrates all building blocks including a gain controllable wideband LNA, a I/Q merged quadrature mixer, a fifth-order Gm–C bi-quad Chebyshev LPF/VGA, a fast-settling frequency synthesizer with a poly-phase filter, a linear broadband up-conversion quadrature modulator, an active D2S converter and a variable-gain power amplifier. The ESD protected transceiver is fabricated in Jazz Semiconductor's 0.18-μm RF CMOS with an area of 6.1 mm2 and draws a total current of 221 mA from 1.8-V supply. The receiver achieves a maximum voltage gain of 68 dB with a control range of 42 dB in 6 dB/step, noise figures of 5.5–8.8 dB for three sub-bands, and an in-band/out-band IIP3 better than −4 dBm/+9 dBm. The transmitter achieves an output power ranging from −10.7 to −3 dBm with gain control, an output P1dB better than −7.7 dBm, a sideband rejection about 32.4 dBc, and LO suppression of 31.1 dBc. The hopping time among sub-bands is less than 2.05 ns.