A Wideband Low-Power RF-to-BB Current-Reuse Receiver Using an Active Inductor and 1 /f Noise-Cancellation for L-Band Applications

Abstract

A low-power and wideband RF-to-baseband (BB) current-reuse receiver (CRR) front-end utilizing both a <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$1/f$ </tex-math></inline-formula> noise cancellation (NC) technique and an active inductor (AI) is proposed tuned to operate from 1 GHz to 1.7 GHz for L-Band applications, including those that require high modulation bandwidths. The CRR front-end employs a single supply and shares the bias current of the low noise transconductance amplifier (LNTA) with the BB circuits to reduce the power consumption. To minimize the losses of the radio frequency (RF) signal right before down-conversion, a high impedance AI circuit isolates the mixer input from the CRR output node. The <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$1/f$ </tex-math></inline-formula> NC circuit suppresses the low frequency noise of the LNTA that leaks to the output. A common-gate LNTA with <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mathrm {g_{m}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> -boosting, along with a single-to-differential LC-balun are used to enhance the input matching, conversion gain and noise figure (NF). The proposed receiver is fabricated in a TSMC 130 nm CMOS process and occupies an active area of 0.54mm2. The input matching (S11) is below −10 dB from 1 GHz to 1.7 GHz. At a local-oscilator (LO) frequency of 1.3 GHz, intermediate-frequency (IF) of 10 MHz and default current settings, the CRR achieves a conversion gain of 41.5 dB, a double-sideband (DSB) NF of 6.5 dB, and an IIP3 of −28.2 dBm while consuming 1.66 mA from a 1.2 V supply.