Design of 1.8-mW PLL-Free 2.4-GHz Receiver Utilizing Temperature-Compensated FBAR Resonator

Abstract

This paper presents a 1.8-mW 2.4-GHz channelized receiver for ISM-band applications. Unlike traditional ISM-band radios which typically require a phase-locked loop (PLL) for channelization, we propose a modified sliding-IF receiver architecture with a suitable local oscillator (LO) frequency plan utilizing a temperature-compensated thin film bulk acousticwave resonator (FBAR). This strategy completely eliminates the need for a PLL by directly dividing down the fixed FBAR oscillator frequency. An inductor-less current-reuse balun LNA is proposed allowing a low-power wideband matching as well as noise cancelling. The frequency conversion is achieved by a hybrid mixer, which stacks a switching mixer on a switched-gm mixer for current reuse. It also features good voltage headroom and common-mode noise rejection. The FBAR-based Colpitts oscillator achieves the phase noise of -144 dBc/Hz at 3.5-MHz offset. The measured RX gain, noise figure, and in-band IIP3 are 57.8 dB, 15.7 dB, and -18.5 dBm, respectively, without external crystal and on-chip inductors, which allows us to reduce the size and weight of the receiver system. It dissipates 0.86 mW (RX) and 0.92 mW (LO) from a single 1-V supply.