High-Linearity Bottom-Plate Mixing Technique With Switch Sharing for $N$-path Filters/Mixers

Abstract

A four-path filter/mixer for surface acoustic wave (SAW)-less frequency division duplex (FDD) radio receivers is proposed, targeting high linearity and compression requirements. A bottom-plate mixing technique improves linearity by reducing the gate-source voltage modulation of the MOSFET switches. Differential bottom-plate mixing allows for switch sharing which halves the effective switch resistance to reduce drain-source voltage modulation. The first four-path switch-RC filter stage with bottom-plate mixing and a shared switch renders 2nd-order voltage-domain RF-bandpass filtering around the LO frequency. Extra out-of-band rejection is implemented combined with V-I conversion and zero-IF frequency down-conversion in the second cross-coupled switch-RC four-path stage, which offers a low-ohmic high-linearity current path for out-of-band interferers. A prototype chip fabricated in a 28-nm CMOS technology achieves an out-of-band IIP3 of +44 dBm, IIP2 of +90 dBm and blocker 1-dB gain-compression point of +13 dBm for a blocker frequency offset of 80 MHz. At this offset frequency, the measured desensitization is only 0.6 dB for a 0-dBm blocker, and 3.5 dB for a 10-dBm blocker at 0.7-GHz LO (i.e., 6- and 9-dB blocker noise figure). The chip consumes 38-96 mW for LO-frequencies of 0.1-2 GHz and occupies an active area of 0.49 mm <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> .