A 2G/3G/4G SAW-Less Receiver Front-End Adopting Switchable Front-End Architecture

In this paper, a surface acoustic wave (SAW)-less receiver (RX) front-end adopting switchable front-end architecture has been presented for second-generation/third-generation/fourth-generation cellular applications. Depending on the RX-transmitter (TX) frequency separation, a favorable down-mixing architecture is selected between a current-sampling mixer and a voltage-sampling mixer. The proposed switchable architecture meets the specification of an input-referred second-order intercept point (IIP2) for the SAW-less RX while minimizing the power consumption. The implemented RX front-end consists of a wideband capacitor cross-coupled common-gate low-noise amplifier, a 25% duty-cycle passive mixer with IIP2 calibration circuitry, a baseband transconductor, and a trans-impedance amplifier. Fabricated in a 65-nm CMOS process, the SAW-less RX front-end provides conversion gain of 42 dB, and achieves noise figure of below 3.3 dB, out-of-band input-referred third-order intercept point of -2 dBm, and IIP2 of more than 56 dBm. It draws an average current of 14.8 mA from 1.2 V. The die area is 1.71 mm².