3.7 A fully integrated TV tuner front-end with 3.1dB NF, >+31dBm OIP3, >83dB HRR3/5 and >68dB HRR7

In TV tuner systems, the RF front-end design has been a challenging issue since it must simultaneously satisfy over 65dB of harmonic rejection (HR), and have high linearity for high-power input and low noise over wide bandwidth (48-to-870MHz). In terms of harmonic rejection, even though the state-of-the-art work reports over 60dB rejections on the 3^rd- and 5^th- order harmonics with a single mixer [1], higher-than-5^th-order harmonic rejections are still required for the low-band channels in TV tuners and thereby RF filters are indispensable at the RF front-end. However, due to the difficulties of integrating RF filters satisfying low noise and high linearity over wide bandwidth, the previous works inevitably had to use external inductors [2-4]. Although a recent work successfully integrates an RF filter satisfying all the stringent specifications by current-domain signal flow from the LNA output to the baseband stage [5], the transconductance stage at the filter input is not linear enough to drive the high-power input and thus the input signal needs to be attenuated at the RF front-end, which eventually degrades system SNR.