A single chip 2.4GHz quadrature LNA-IQ mixer in 180nm CMOS technology

Abstract

This paper presents a 2.4GHz single chip quadrature low noise amplifier (QLNA) and IQ mixer in standard 180 nm CMOS technology. Quadrature generation is achieved in the RF path using a type-II RC-CR network which exhibits good phase and amplitude balance while reducing insertion loss making it less vulnerable to process variations and external components. Various circuit techniques such as PCSNIM and low power optimization are adopted to acquire good performance with respect to power consumption and cost. In the implementation of LNA stage, an inductive source degeneration and inductive loading is used for low noise, high gain and good input matching. The mixing stage integrates an active IQ mixer with low pass filter (LPF) load. Current bleeding technique is adopted to further improve the conversion gain and noise performance. The extracted results of this proposed design shows a high gain of 22dB at IF frequency of 100MHz with a noise figure (NF) of 9dB. The input 1-dB compression point (P1DB) and input referred third-order intercept point (IIP3) are −20 dBm and −11dBm respectively. The overall QLNA-mixer consumes 3.5 mA of current from a 1.8 V headroom.