Design of CMOS RF low-noise amplifiers and mixer for wireless applications

The recent upsurge in the demand for low-power portable wireless communication products creates a lot of research opportunities. Popular applications include mobile phones, wireless local area networks (WLANs), wireless personal area networks (WPANs), radio frequency identification systems (RFIDs). On the other hand, complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) process has been advanced and become very attractive for radio-frequency (RF) circuits to be integrated with the digital integrated circuits, which can reduce the cost, size, and power dissipation for the wireless systems. Receiver front-end (RFE), including low-noise amplifier (LNA) and mixer, plays an important role in wireless receivers. Not only does it operate at high frequencies, but it also needs to have low noise and good linearity while consuming low power. In this thesis, wideband and high linearity circuit techniques are proposed for CMOS RFE, including fully integrated LNAs for WLAN, cable TV, ultra-wideband (UWB), and RFID applications. Inductive series peaking technique is proposed as wideband output loading to enable an UWB LNA to work from 3 to 8GHz. A 2nd-intermodulation (IM) injection technique is proposed to linearize the RFID LNA. A new mixer topology, with LO switching pair at the bottom of the transconductance cells and with an inductor in series with the LO switching pair, is also proposed to achieve high performance in terms of frequency and linearity. The LNAs and mixers proposed are all successfully integrated as part of the transceiver for WLAN, cable TV, UWB and RFID reader applications