Design of an Active Inductor-Based T/R Switch in 0.13 μm CMOS Technology for 2.4 GHz RF Transceivers

Abstract

A high-performance transmit/receive (T/R) switch is essential for every radio-frequency (RF) device. This paper proposes a T/R switch that is designed in the CEDEC 0.13 μm complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology for 2.4 GHz ISM-band RF applications. The switch exhibits a 1 dB insertion loss, a 28.6 dB isolation, and a 35.8 dBm power-handling capacity in the transmit mode; meanwhile, for the 1.8 V/0 V control voltages, a 1.1 dB insertion loss and a 19.4 dB isolation were exhibited with an extremely-low power dissipation of 377.14 μW in the receive mode. Besides, the variations of the insertion loss and the isolation of the switch for a temperature change from - 25℃ to 125℃ are 0.019 dB and 0.095 dB, respectively. To obtain a lucrative performance, an active inductor-based resonant circuit, body floating, a transistor W/L optimization, and an isolated CMOS structure were adopted for the switch design. Further, due to the avoidance of bulky inductors and capacitors, a very small chip size of 0.0207 mm2 that is the lowest-ever reported chip area for this frequency band was achieved.