A wideband receiver front-end with low noise and high linearity by exploiting reconfigurable dual paths in 180 nm CMOS

Abstract

In this paper, a wideband receiver front-end including the flexible reconfigurable main and auxiliary paths is proposed. Therein, the main path has the low-noise advantage thanks to the low-noise transconductance amplifier (LNTA) preceding the mixer and baseband. Meanwhile, by utilizing a mixer-first structure, the auxiliary path renders a high in-band and out-of-band linearity. Furthermore, an inductor resonance structure is also designed to mitigate the baseband noise crosstalk issue which is disclosed by a charging/discharging mechanism via the tail capacitance of passive mixers. Both of the receiving paths have shared a common baseband circuit while loading a commonly-shared 25% duty-cycle LO source generator. Simulation results by a 180 nm CMOS have demonstrated that the main path provides a low noise figure (NF) of 2.7 dB, while the auxiliary path obtains the in-band and out-of-band IIP3 of 9.2 and 21 dBm under typical LO excitation frequency of [Formula: see text] GHz. The power consumption of the main path of the dual-path front-end is 57 mW and that of the auxiliary path is 26 mW under a supply voltage of 1.8 V.