CMOS K-band receiver architectures for low-IF applications

Two K-band low-IF receivers, a single channel receiver and a quadrature receiver, are designed and fabricated in a 130 nm CMOS process. It is demonstrated that, with the proposed polyphase filter, the quadrature receiver is able to achieve similar performance as the single channel receiver in various aspects while maintaining the advantages of quadrature scheme. The measured performance of the single channel receiver includes 14 dB conversion gain, and 8.5 dB noise figure at 23 GHz while the quadrature receiver achieves 15 dB conversion gain with 9 dB noise figure at 25 GHz. With an LO signal power of 0 dBm and low DC power consumption of 12 mW from 1.2 V, the realized receivers compare the state-of-the-art 130 nm CMOS realizations in this band.