A 13-dB IIP3 Improved Low-Power CMOS RF Programmable Gain Amplifier Using Differential Circuit Transconductance Linearization for Various Terrestrial Mobile D-TV Applications

Abstract

A CMOS RF digitally programmable gain amplifier (RF PGA), covering various terrestrial mobile digital TV standards (DMB, ISDB-T, and DVB-H) is implemented as a part of a low-IF tuner IC using 0.18-m CMOS technology. An improvement of 13-dB IIP3 is attained without significant degradation of other performance criteria like gain, noise figure, common-mode rejection ratio, etc., at similar power consumption. This is achieved by applying a newly proposed differential circuit gm (the second derivatives of transconductance) cancellation technique, called the differential multiple gated transistor (DMGTR). In the DMGTR amplifier, the negative value of gm in the fully differential amplifier can be compensated by the positive value of gm in the pseudo differential amplifier which is properly sized and biased. By adopting the DMGTR, a low-power highly linear RF PGA is implemented. Also, in order to have wide gain range with fine step resolution, a new RF PGA architecture is proposed. The measurement results of the proposed RF PGA exhibit 50-dB gain range with 0.25-dB resolution, 4.5-dB noise figure, a 4-dBm IIP3 (maximum 30 dBm) and 25-dB gain at 16-mW power consumption.

A Broadband High Linearity Current-Reuse Bulk-Controlled Mixer for 4g Applications

“…The negative peak of g m can be neutralized by adopting multiple gated transistors. Nevertheless, the techniques still suffer from the additional noise source and power consumption [14]. Moreover, the additional bias resistors and multiple gate transistors also increase the overall chip area.…”

Managing linearity in radio front-ends

“…5 can be utilized. In [23], a differential and pseudo-differential amplifier in parallel with identical inputs are employed for this purpose. The differential amplifier provides the linear gain, and has a negative third-order non-linear coefficient.…”

Two digitally programmable gain amplifiers based on current conveyors

“…The applications are found in particular area such as communication receiver and terrestrial mobile digital television [1][2][3]. In the past, the digitally programmable gain amplifiers with arbitrary range of integer values [4][5][6][7] had been investigated for the possibility of minimizing the number of switches and resistors, and determining the option number of equal valued resistors required for fabricating resistor network.…”

“…Due to the large current required of high frequency operational amplifier, the area consumption is increased [10]. For high frequency applications, open-loop amplifiers using variable transconductance (g m ) or variable output loads (R L ) [2,3] techniques are provided. However, the voltage gain of these amplifiers is sensitive to process and temperature variations.…”