A 2GHz voltage mode power scalable RF-Front-End with 2.5dB-NF and 0.5dBm-1dBCP

Abstract

The removal of the surface acoustic wave (SAW) filter in front of the receiver, in favour of less expensive and less filtering solutions, demands large input signals to be handled (sometimes above OdBm) without degrading the noise floor. Such requirements lead to an increment of power consumption in both the signal and the local oscillator (LO) paths. In the former, larger input compression points (CP) are typically obtained by limiting the voltage gain at RF with the use of current-passive mixer architectures followed by power hungry trans-impedance amplifiers (TIA) [1]–[5]. In the LO path, large input signals demand power hungry buffers (with phase noise (PN) even below -170dBc/Hz) to deal with reciprocal mixing phenomena [6].