ARCHER: An Automated RF-IC Rx Front-End Circuit Design Tool

This paper presents a tool capable of compiling automatically the schematic circuit design of a direct conversion receiver based on system specifications including frequency of operation, gain, noise figure, and IIP3 linearity. The rx front-end of a direct conversion receiver is built using inductive source degeneration (LSD) LNA and single-balanced source-degenerated Gilbert Cell mixers with charge injection. The tool uses power constrained noise and linearity optimization vector-space algorithms that size automatically the transistors, passive components, and finds the optimum biasing points. The solution generated by the tool is automatically read by Agilent ADS where the blocks are easily fine-tuned and validated before layout.