A monolithic RF transceiver for DC-OFDM UWB

Abstract

This paper presents a first monolithic RF transceiver for DC-OFDM UWB applications. The proposed direct-conversion transceiver integrates all the building blocks including two receiver (Rx) cores, two transmitter (Tx) cores and a dual-carrier frequency synthesizer (DC-FS) as well as a 3-wire serial peripheral interface (SPI) to set the operating status of the transceiver. The ESD-protected chip is fabricated by a TSMC 0.13-μm RF CMOS process with a die size of 4.5 × 3.6 mm2. The measurement results show that the wideband Rx achieves an NF of 5–6.2 dB, a max gain of 76–84 dB with 64-dB variable gain, an in-/out-of-band IIP3 of −6/+4 dBm and an input loss S11 of < −10 in all bands. The Tx achieves an LOLRR/IMGRR of −34/-33 dBc, a typical OIP3 of +6 dBm and a maximum output power of −5 dBm. The DC-FS outputs two separate carriers simultaneously with an inter-band hopping time of < 1.2 ns. The full chip consumes a maximum current of 420 mA under a 1.2-V supply.