A 1.5 GHz high-Q receiver based on current reuse

In this paper, an FBAR-based low power low-IF RF receiver prototype is presented. The receiver front-end uses a current reuse structure for reduced power consumption. The stacked LNA-Mixer-VCO (LMV) block implements RF amplification, frequency down conversion and IF amplification. The differential Colpitts VCO utilizes a high-Q FBAR, realizing an LO with phase noise of -139 dBc/Hz at 1MHz frequency offset achieving a FoM of 200dB. A second high-Q FBAR resonator is used for impedance matching at the LNA input, achieving an |S11| of -22 dB. The LMV cell has a 52 dB voltage gain. In addition, a four-stage IF amplifier converts the analog IF output to rail-to-rail digital signal at the output.