New Design Techniques for RF Receivers

Despite two decades of research on RF circuits, challenges in RF design abound. The demand for a single, compact receiver that operates across different bands has led to considerable work on architecture and circuit techniques. This research addresses two critical receiver issues, namely, harmonic rejection and channel selection. It is shown that a bandwidth-programmable low-noise amplifier can suppress blockers at the local oscillator harmonics by 20 dB.A holy grail in RF design has been to perform channel-selection filtering at RF rather than at IF or baseband. This research introduces the concept of "Miller notch filter" and demonstrates how it can provide channel selection while satisfying the exacting specifications of GSM and WCDMA. Realized in 65-nm CMOS technology, the receiver exhibits a noise figure of 2.9 dB and draws 20 mW with a 1.2-V supply at 2 GHz. The receiver can tolerate a 0-dBm blocker at 23-MHz offset and its RF channel selection devices can be readily configured to operate with WCDMA or IEEE802.11b/g as well