Design and Compliance Testing of a SiGe WCDMA Receiver IC With Integrated Analog Baseband

A 2.7-3.3 V 32-mA SiGe direct-conversion wide-band code division multiple access (WCDMA) receiver IC integrating the RF front-end and analog baseband on a single chip has been completed and measured. Analog performance specifications for the design were driven by the 3GPP specifications. To close the loop from 3GPP specifications to IC design specifications to hardware performance results, a subset of compliance tests for both the analog as well as the digital 3GPP specifications was performed. The IC design includes a bypassable low-noise amplifier (LNA), a quadrature direct-downconverter, an automatically tuned channel-select filter, wide dynamic-range baseband amplifiers, and a serial digital interface. Power-saving modes allow the LNA to be powered down when the input signal is sufficiently large, reducing current consumption to 23 mA. In addition, the entire Q-channel signal path can be optionally powered down during control-channel monitoring, further reducing current draw to 17 mA nominal. The IC showed full compliance with the static channel 3GPP specification tests performed, including all analog/RF compliance tests and a set of DPCH_Ec/Ior sensitivity tests from 12.2 through 384 kb/s as measured with a software baseband processor.