A SAW-less dual-band RF front-end for IR-UWB receiver in 65nm CMOS

In this paper a highly linear-dual band RF front-end (LNA and Mixer) for IR-UWB (IEEE 802.15.4a) applications is proposed. LNA exploits a common-gate (CG) stage in parallel to a common-source (CS). It performs single-ended to differential-ended operation, avoiding balun stage. It features 18 dB maximum gain, <;4 dB noise figure and +4 dBm inband third-order intermodulation intercept (IIP3). A double-peak single notch input network with a dual-band LC load is used for input matching and for WLAN (5-6 GHz) out-of-band interferers suppression resulting in +16 dBm out-of-band IIP3. This allows to remove the 5-6GHz WLAN dedicated filtering at the antenna reducing costs. The proposed mixer is a Gilbert cell and features derivative superposition method and source degenerations at the input stage to improve linearity performance showing > +11.8 dBm IIP3. The RF front-end receiver has been designed in 65nm CMOS technology consuming 13.5 mW.