A Wideband Receiver With Resonant Multi-Phase LO and Current Reuse Harmonic Rejection Baseband

In this work we present an architecture for a low power SDR which draws on techniques from both narrowband low power radios and recent work in SDRs. The receiver consists of a wide tuning-range passive mixer, driven with resonant non-overlapping LO drive combined with a noise-power optimized multi-path baseband amplifier. LO generation circuitry drives the mixer with an 8-phase, 12.5% duty cycle LO, but does so directly from complementary LC-tank VCOs in order to resonate out the gate capacitance of the mixer. A capacitor sharing technique on the baseband side of the mixer doubles the RX frequency range of the 8-phase clock at no added cost in power or performance, while achieving a NF as low as 7 dB. The 1.8 mW low noise baseband amplifier reuses the bias current of its four input channels while rejecting the 3rd/5th harmonics by >34 dB. The receiver consumes 10–12 mW (including VCOs, pulse generation and baseband) over a frequency range of 0.7–3.2 GHz with a 1.3 V supply.