Design of Ultra-Low Power High-Q Single Ended Active Inductors for IF BPF of Receiver Frontend Using 130 nm BiCMOS Technology

Abstract

In this work, performance of conventional gyrator-C based active inductor is studied and two designs of single-ended active inductors based on modified gyrator-C topology employing SiGe HBTs are proposed using 130 nm BiCMOS technology which provides high quality factor with low-power consumption. The performance in terms of inductive bandwidth, S11, noise figure, quality factor and power consumption have been compared and the tradeoff between performance parameters are discussed. In the proposed work, first design of active inductor produces high value of inductive bandwidth (271 MHz–3.7 GHz) with moderate value of quality factor (437), whereas second design produces moderate range of inductive bandwidth (182 MHz–2.3 GHz) with high quality factor (6014). The proposed active inductors are used in second order LC band pass filter and the performance metrics of filter in terms of 1 dB compression point (− 18.88 and − 18.55), IIP3 (− 14.68 and − 9.02) and passband gain is investigated. The study suggests that proposed designs of active inductors are suitable candidate for high performance, low power RF applications with nearly 1 GHz bandwidth.