Companding Baseband Switched Capacitor Filters and ADCs for WLAN Applications

In this paper, system level design techniques for companding baseband switched capacitor (SC) filters for WLAN applications are presented. With companding, no AGC is required in front of the filter. A filter prototype is designed for 802.11g receiver and simulation results show that, with careful design of the opamps, a total harmonic distortion of less than 0.5% can be achieved. A new type of companding ADCs along with the algorithm to achieve companding in ADCs is proposed. It is shown that companding by a factor of 4 reduces the power consumption of the SC filter by a factor close to 4 times for a given dynamic range whereas it directly results in 12 dB reduction in the dynamic range requirement of the following ADC.