A new RF front-end and frequency synthesizer architecture for 3.1-10.6 GHz MB-OFDM UWB receivers

In this paper, an RF front-end and frequency synthesizer architecture is presented that targets a 3.1-10.6 GHz, low-cost, low-complexity, low power consumption, fully integrated receiver with minimum off-chip components for multiband OFDM ultrawideband (MB-OFDM UWB) systems. This paper provides an insight on how to determine the requirements, address design trade-offs and derive receiver specifications. A thorough study on out-of-band blockers reveals a few design trade-offs when implementing a UWB receiver with full frequency coverage. This observation leads to a front-end combining a wideband balun with a single-ended LNA that allows highest degree of on-chip integration. In addition, by exploiting the inherent relationship among band center frequencies, a new frequency synthesis scheme is proposed to generate all 14 MB-OFDM UWB bands with minimum number of mixing steps