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Microsystem Technologies

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12-08-2019 | Technical Paper

A fully CMOS RF down-converter with 81.88 dB SFDR for IEEE 802.15.4 based wireless systems

Authors: S. Chrisben Gladson, K. Alekhya, M. Bhaskar

Published in: Microsystem Technologies | Issue 3/2022

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Abstract

In this paper, the challenges of dense integration, low power, low-cost, low-noise and high spurious free dynamic range (SFDR) required by the RF front-end (RFE) circuits for low-rate wireless personal area networks are addressed. The proposed RF down-converter circuit utilizes a low-noise transconductance amplifier stage to improve the noise performance of the highly noisy switching stage of the down-converter. The nonlinearity of the low-noise stage is compensated by employing post-distortion based harmonic cancellation for dynamic range improvement of the RF front-end circuit. The proposed RFE is designed and realised in UMC 180 nm CMOS process technology. The post-layout characterization of the circuit shows an third-order intercept point with reference to the input (IIP3) of 11.83 dBm, double-sideband noise figure of 5.9 dB, conversion gain of 17.87 dB and offers a SFDR of 81.88 dB while consuming 5 mA current from 1.8 V. The proposed circuit consumes an area of 0.1 mm². The proposed RF down-converter boasts a 17 dB improvement in SFDR over the recently proposed RFE in the literature. The proposed RFE is also correlated with the other existing state-of-art RFE circuits recorded in the literature for Zigbee applications.

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Title: A fully CMOS RF down-converter with 81.88 dB SFDR for IEEE 802.15.4 based wireless systems
Authors: S. Chrisben Gladson
K. Alekhya
M. Bhaskar
Publication date: 12-08-2019
Publisher: Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Published in: Microsystem Technologies / Issue 3/2022
Print ISSN: 0946-7076
Electronic ISSN: 1432-1858
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00542-019-04576-z

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