A fully-integrated CMOS RF front-end for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth

A fully-integrated CMOS RF front-end for ISM band applications is presented. The RF front-end is designed in a 0.18 μm RF CMOS technology and used in a zero-IF Wi-Fi (IEEE 802.11b WLAN) and low-IF Bluetooth receiver. The RF front-end provides dual gain mode, 25 dB or 15 dB, to alleviate the linearity requirements of the following stages such as analog baseband filters and variable-gain amplifiers. It also presents low noise figure and high linearity. Noise figure, IIP3, and IIP2 are 4.1 dB, -11.6 dBm, 43.2 dBm for high gain mode, and 10.1 dB, -3.5 dBm, 55.2 dBm for low gain mode, respectively. The power consumption of the RF front-end is significantly reduced by using zero-IF/low-IF receiver architectures and only 22.7 mW from a 1.8 V supply voltage. The corner frequency of the flicker noise is only 46 kHz. The bondpad and package parasitics are also taken into account for the design and simulation.