Novel silicon-on-insulator SP5T switch-LNA front-end IC enabling concurrent dual-band 256-QAM 802.11ac WLAN radio operations

An innovative SOI SP5T switch-LNA integrated circuit is presented. The switch-LNA consists of a diplexer that provides out-of-band rejection and enables dual-band concurrent operation, a dual-band LNA with bypass attenuators, and three high linearity transmit paths. Tx paths feature 0.1 dB compression at >33 dBm input power, with >35 dB Tx to Rx isolation, and 0.8 and 1.2 dB insertion loss for low and high bands respectively. Receive paths feature 12 dB gain with 2.5-2.8 dB NF. Cascading the design with a dual-band WLAN PA, a complex dual-band front-end module can be easily constructed in a 3 x 4 mm package, which demonstrates transmit and receive LNA linearity with EVM <; 2% at >16 dBm and > - 5dBm output power respectively and compliant with the linearity requirements of the 802.11ac standard up to of 256-QAM 80 MHz operations.