Design of radio frequency integrated circuit for RF to DC power converter for bio-medical application

Abstract

In modern biomedical communication systems, high level integration using CMOS technologies plays an important role for low cost performance. For mobile biomedical communication systems, the low voltage and low power design issues are crucial due to the limitation of battery capacity. Therefore, the volume and weight of the transceivers can be further reduced using the low voltage and low power technique. As such, all the designs proposed here are realized with standard CMOS technology and they are suitable to be a building block in low voltage, low cost, compact size, high gain and low power receiver front end design owing to the superior performance. The most significant building blocks in the receiver front end are low noise amplifier (LNA),RF to DC rectifier(RFDC) , local oscillator (LO) and intermediate frequency (IF) amplifier. Here, the main emphasis is given on design of the RFDC rectifier, which is regarded as the main part of the receiver front end, as the total linearity of a system dependents on the linearity of the RFDC rectifier. In CMOS transceivers, the Gilbert cell RFDC rectifier is widely used as the down converter since they are broadband with good isolation, good conversion gain and high linearity, nevertheless with some drawbacks of high supply voltage and high power consumption. In this work, different integrated topologies are implemented to dissolve the trade-off problems in the RFDC rectifier design. The simulated results show significant improvements in the aforementioned parameters in comparison to recent approaches.