A Low-Power Wideband Receiver Front-End for NB-IoT Applications

A low-power wideband receiver front-end is proposed for the narrow-band internet of things (NB-IoT) wireless standard to cover frequency bands from 0.6GHz to 1.4GHz. The front-end receiver integrates a programmable gain quadrature RF-to-baseband (BB) current-reuse receiver (CRR) architecture using conventional double-balanced passive-mixer with 25% duty-cycle local oscillator (LO) followed by a passive polyphase filter (PPF), high pass filter (HPF), programmable gain $g_{m}-C$ filter and RC-low pass filter (LPF). Low-power consumption is achieved by employing RF-to-BB CRR that shares a single supply with a wideband transconductor and a transimpedance amplifier (TIA). Moreover, power consumption is reduced by employing a single path PPF and $g_{m}-C$ filter to attenuate the blocker frequency at 7.5MHz above the intermediate frequency (IF). The proposed architecture is post-layout simulated in TSMC 130-nm CMOS technology. It achieves a voltage gain of 59.4dB, a noise figure (NF) of 4.9dB and a out-of-band IIP3 of −34.2dBm at 900MHz while consuming 1.8mW from a 1.2V supply at the maximum gain setting. In addition, the input matching covers several NB-IoT frequency-bands.