A low power and high linearity dual path up-down converter for wireless telecommunication repeater system

This paper proposes low power and high linearity up-down frequency converter for wireless telecommunication repeaters. A wireless telecommunication repeater is typically required high linearity and certain system dynamic range for automatic gain control (AGC). Furthermore, the demand of low power repeaters is increasing recently for green IT purpose. Capacitor cross-couple and threshold voltage decreasing techniques are applied to each sub building block in order to achieve the lowest power consumption and the highest linearity in a given technology and power supply voltage. Also, an ultra-low power wake-up receiver is implemented to control the shut-down when no user exits in the repeaters´ connection range. One path of the converter is composed of a wideband down-converting mixer, programmable gain amplifiers (PGA), and a wideband up-converting mixer. The total power consumption is 150mA at 3.3V power supply. The output IP3s of the down-converting mixer and the up-converting mixer are 38dBm at 3dBm two tones output power and 25dBm at -10dBm two tones output power, respectively. The total dynamic gain range is more than 43dB with 1dB step resolution. Furthermore, 3mA wake-up receiver is designed and implemented. The up-down converter is fabricated on a 0.35um SiGe Bipolar CMOS technology.