A high Q on-chip bondwire transformer and its application to low power receiver front-end design

This work presents a high Q on-chip bondwire transformer and its application to a low power receiver front-end design. The proposed bondwire transformer has the advantage of high quality factor, less sensitivity to the bonding height variation, and working as a balun to conduct single-to-differential conversion. Furthermore, the chip area under the bondwire transformer can be reused by the mixer and buffer circuits to reduce the cost. The receiver front-end is realized in 1P6M 0.18 μm CMOS technology. The measured input return loss, the conversion gain, the noise figure, and the input third-order intercept point are 12.7 dB, 20.5 dB, 9.8 dB, and -4.0 dBm, respectively, at 2.1 GHz. The power consumption is only 1.1 mW from a 1 V supply.