A 1.04 mm2, low-power front-end circuit of receiver in 0.18μm CMOS for IEEE 802.11a application

An integrated CMOS front-end circuit of receiver according to the IEEE 802.11a standard is presented in this paper. The front-end circuit comprises low noise amplifier (LNA), active balun, voltage control oscillator (VCO), and source pumped mixer. The proposed source pumped mixer can achieve high linearity and high gain performances. When integrated in a 0.18 μm CMOS technology, the front-end circuit exhibits an area of only 1.04 mm². The proposed front-end circuit achieves measured conversion gain of 19dB, input third-order intercept point (IIP3) of -11 dBm, VCO tuning range of 780 MHz and a phase noise of -108 dBc/Hz at 1-MHz offset frequency under consuming power of 24.5 mW from 1.8V supply voltage.