A Package Aware QLMVF Receiver Front End

Abstract

This brief presents a 2.4 GHz receiver front end in the form of architecture of quadrature LNA-Mixer-VCO-filter (QLMVF) cell in 180 nm CMOS with split-transconductance amplifiers (TCAs). Instead of a single stack-current-reusing QLMV scheme, the proposed design employs two separate current reuse stages with a passive mixer to provide better flicker noise and linearity performance. A shunt-inductive input-match single-ended low noise amplifier (LNA) proposed with an improved package parasitic compensation through a simple varactor tuning. The quad-flat-no-leads (QFN) packaged receiver provides a measured maximum conversion gain of 40 dB, a noise figure (NF) of 10 dB, and a third-order input intercept point (IIP3) of -5 dBm with a spurious-free dynamic range (SFDR) of 60 dB. The front end consuming 2.7 mW of power from a 1.8 V supply and occupies an area of 1.5 mm <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> .