Wideband SAW-Less Receiver Front-End With Harmonic Rejection Mixer in 65-nm CMOS

A wideband direct-conversion receiver front-end featuring a new harmonic rejection technique is demonstrated in 65-nm CMOS. The circuit consists of a two-stage low-noise amplifier, the first stage with capacitive feedback, a harmonic rejection mixer using 25% and 50% duty cycle local oscillator signals, and a third-order channel-select filter with configurable bandwidth. The receiver front-end is intended for surface-acoustic-wave-less cellular applications, and its performance was measured at 900- and 1800-MHz bands. The average harmonic rejection over GSM and LTE channel bandwidths is between 60 and 70 dB. Peak harmonic rejection exceeds 80 dB. The noise figures (NFs) are 3.3 and 3.9 dB for the complete receiver front-end in low band and high band, respectively, with an S₁₁ below -15 dB from 500 MHz to 2.5 GHz. The 1-dB received signal compression points with a blocker present at 20/80 MHz offset for low/high band are 0 and +2 dBm, respectively. The NF with 0-dBm blocker is 13 dB. For low band, the in-band IIP3 and IIP2 are -14.8 and > 49 dBm, respectively, and, for high band, -18.2 and > 44 dBm. The circuit worst case consumes 80 mW of power.