RF integration at 900 MHz/1800 MHz

The author reports on the work on UHF microwave Si RF components in integrated form. The ultimate intention is to provide a fully integrated radio front-end, including RF amplifier, mixer, VCO and synthesiser prescaler on a single chip, with very low power consumption. A high performance silicon bipolar process, mainly intended for digital applications was used. It has proved possible to design an RF amplifier with 2.6 dB noise figure, +2 dBm third order intercept and <10 mW power consumption at 1 GHz. The corresponding mixer shows a sub-5 dB noise figure at the same power consumption and frequency, with only minor degradation at 1.8 GHz. Both devices include power-down modes with nanowatt dissipation, including all switching circuits. These figures agree well with circuit simulations, showing that circuit design at these frequencies can be a reproducible operation