The MAX2530 receiver RF front-end IC, using Maxim's advanced SiGe process, was originally designed for cellular-band and PCS band operation. For 450MHz CDMA, the NF (noise figure) and the IIP3 (input third-order intercept) of the low noise amplifier (LNA) are very critical in considering the sensitivity, and the single-tone desensitization effect. This technical note gives the tuning method and...

Interest in SOI technology has been increased due to recent progress in modeling parasitic effects needed for analog IC design. In this paper a brief overview of the SOI technology is done. A user compiled model built for ADS is then described before the analysis of 2 RF designs: a wideband Low Noise Amplifier (300MHz-900MHz with more than 10dB gain and 5dBm IIP3) and an antenna switch (with 0....

* Department of Electrical Engineering, Technion, Haifa, Israel ([email protected]) We present our design methodology of a low-noise amplifier (LNA) in 0.18 μm CMOS technology. A 24-GHz LNA having peak gain of 13.8 dB and record low minimum noise figure of 2.8 dB at 25.1 GHz was demonstrated. High quality factor slow wave transmission lines replaced all inductors in the circuit. The LNA ...

This paper presents a general analysis of the 3rd-order nonlinearity of a differential common-emitter (CE) radio frequency (RF) amplifier and a novel way to cancel the 3rd-order nonlinearity. A SiGe BiCMOS mixer is designed based on the 3rd-order cancellation scheme. The mixer achieves +6dBm IIP3, 15dB gain and 7.7dB NF with only 2.2mA current at 2.1GHz. This performance substantially exceeds t...

Two variable gain amplifiers (VGAs) that adopt new approximated exponential equations are proposed in this paper. The dB-linear range of the proposed VGAs is extended more than what the approximated exponential equations predict by a bias circuit technique that adopts negative feedback. The proposed VGAs feature wide gain variation, low-power, high linearity, wide control signal range, and smal...

In this article, we present a passive mixer-first receiver front end providing low-power integrated solution for high interference robustness in radios targeting Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications. The employs novel N-path filter/mixer, linear baseband amplifier, and step-up transformer to realize sub-6-dB NF >20-dBm OB-IIP3 concurrently. proposed filter/mixer exploits an implicit capacitive...

Carrier aggregation is one of the key features to increase the data rate given a scarce bandwidth spectrum. This paper describes the design of a high performance receiver suitable for carrier aggregation in LTE-Advanced and future 5 G standards. The proposed architecture is versatile to support legacy mode (single carrier), inter-band carrier aggregation, and intra-band carrier aggregation. Per...

Spurious-free dynamic range (SFDR) is a key specification of radio receivers and spectrum analyzers, characterizing the maximum distance between signal and noise+distortion. SFDR is limited by the linearity (intercept point IIP3 mostly, sometimes IIP2) and the noise floor. As receivers already have low noise figure (NF) there is more room for improving the SFDR by increasing the linearity. As t...

A square-law harmonic-rejection mixer (SL-HRM) driven by a sine local oscillator (LO) is proposed for wideband and tunable rejection of all LO harmonics. The key performances including the gain, noise figure (NF), input-referred third-order intercept point (IIP3), and harmonic rejection ratio (HRR) with respect to the amplitude and purity of the sine-LO are analyzed. In the circuit level, the S...