A CMOS low power, wide dynamic range RSSI with integrated AGC loop

A low voltage low power CMOS limiter and received signal strength indicator (RSSI) with integrated automatic gain control (AGC) loop are designed using TSMC 0.13um CMOS technology. The limiter uses six-stage amplifier architecture for minimum power consideration achieves 56dB gain and 17MHz bandwidth. The RSSI has a dynamic range more than 60dB, and the RSSI linearity error is within ±0.5dB for an input power from -65dBm to -8dBm. The RSSI output voltage is from 0.2V to 1V and the slope of the curve is 14.28mV/dB. The RSSI with integrated AGC loop draws 1.5 mA (I and Q paths) from a 1.2V single supply, including limiters, RSSI and comparators.