A 10mW CMOS RF Front-End for Portable GPS Receivers

An integrated 1.57 GHz Low Noise Amplifier (LNA) and an active balanced mixer for the RF front-end in the portable global positioning system (GPS) receivers is proposed based on SMIC 180 nm 1P6M RF CMOS process. The MOS transistors in the proposed LNA are biased in moderately inverted region to achieve low power. The active balanced mixer is based on Gilbert cell. The post-layout simulation results show that, at worst case, a voltage conversion gain of 35 dB is achieved with cascade noise figure (NF) of 3.3 dB, an input return loss of 17.7 dB and an input 1dB compression point of -38 dBm. The power consumption of the circuit is 10 mW at supply voltage of 1.8 V.