A Sub-0.6V, 330 µW, 0.15 mm2 Receiver Front-End for Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) in 22 nm FD-SOI with Zero External Components

Abstract

A 2.4 GHz highly power efficient receiver front-end for Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is presented in this paper. Thanks to the extensive current reuse scheme combined with the passive source-boosting topology and exploiting forward back gate biasing (FBB) of active devices, the low-noise transconductance amplifier (LNTA) input impedance is matched to 50 $\Omega$ with 18 times less current compared to a single common-gate (CG) LNTA. Moreover, a high swing Class-C VCO operating at the twice the desired frequency drives the frequency divider by 2 to create 4 phases with 25% duty cycle. Implemented in 22 nm FD-SOI technology, the proposed receiver front-end consumes only $330 \mu \mathbf{W}$ from 0.55 V and occupies an active area of 0.15 mm2. The measured conversion gain and NF are 32.3 dB and 9.4 dB respectively. The proposed receiver consumes the least power among all previous published papers while its performance is largely superior to the requirement of intended applications.