A Folded RF Front-end with Low Flicker Noise for Bluetooth and ZigBee application

This paper presents the designed and implemented RF front-end to reduce the flicker noise and power consumption in TSMC 0.18 mum process. The proposed RF front-end is composed of folded mixer and differential low noise amplifier (LNA). To minimize flicker noise, the proposed RF front-end is designed by using PMOS devices in switching stage of mixers with an resonating inductor. For low power consumption, transconductance stage and switching stage of mixers are designed with folded architecture, and LNA and transconductance stage of mixer are designed with current reused architecture for small current flow. The proposed RF front-end consumes 7.34 mW from 1.2 V supply voltage, while conversion gain of 23 dB is achieved. The IIP3 is -7.4 dBm, and the proposed RF front-end has good linearity. Flicker noise of 10 dB at 1 kHz is acceptable value, and thus proposed RF front-end can be used in direct conversion receiver for a narrow bandwidth.