A CMOS ESD-protected RF front-end for UWB receiver

This paper presents a CMOS receiver front-end for ultra-wideband (UWB) wireless applications within the 3.1-10.6 GHz band. Fabricated in a 0.13 um CMOS technology, the packaged and ESD-protected receiver integrates a broadband low-noise amplifier (LNA), a quadrature downconversion mixer, and local oscillator (LO) amplifiers. The LNA employs a noise-canceling technique to decouple input match from noise figure (NF) while having ESD and package parasitics absorbed into a wideband input matching network. Variable-gain methods are developed for the LNA to obtain gain switching. The proposed double-balanced quadrature mixer has an active balun and a voltage buffer embedded so that it can be directly driven by the single-ended LNA. Drawing 22 mA from 1.5 V, the RFIC provides a voltage conversion gain of 29 dB with an input IP3 of -13.5 dBm and an input IP2 of 24 dBm. Over the entire UWB band, an NF of 4.9-8.8 dB and an S₁₁ <-7 dB were measured.