Design and analysis of ultra-low power third-harmonic receiver with enhanced conversion gain and out-of-band rejection for IEEE 802.11ba

Abstract

This paper presents an ultra-low power (ULP) receiver with enhanced conversion gain and high out-of-band rejection for Wi-Fi 802.11ba. The proposed third-harmonic mixer based on 6-phase non-overlap local oscillator (LO) not only minimizes power of the radio frequency (RF) front-end, but also improves out-of-band rejection. In addition, the 8-bit analog finite impulse response (AFIR) low-pass filter is designed in the baseband circuit, which can greatly improve the adjacent channel rejection (ACR) of the receiver with ultra-low power consumption. Meanwhile, the zero-power tunable tapped-capacitor resonator is proposed, which alleviate the resonance frequency offset impact by using switched capacitors for process corners compensation. This 802.11ba receiver is designed in a 65-nm CMOS process occupying an active area of 0.25 mm². Post-layout simulation results show that, when operating at 2.4 GHz, the receiver achieves an ACR of 93 dB and a voltage gain of 51 dB. It consumes 197 μW DC power from 0.7 V supply voltage.