A Low-Power RF Direct-Conversion Receiver/Transmitter for 2.4-GHz-Band IEEE 802.15.4 Standard in 0.18-$\mu{\hbox {m}}$ CMOS Technology

Abstract

This paper presents a low-power RF receiver/transmitter front-end for 2.4-GHz-band IEEE 802.15.4 standard in 0.18-m CMOS technology. An RF receiver comprises a single-ended low-noise amplifier, a quadrature passive mixer, and a transimpedance amplifier. A current-mode passive mixer showing a very good 1 noise performance is adopted to convert an RF signal directly to a baseband signal. Moreover, this type of passive mixer shows high-linearity performance, leading to overall RF receiver linearity improvement. A low-power, high-linearity transmitter front-end is implemented by using a passive mixer and two-stage driver amplifier in which the first stage is a conventional cascode amplifier and the second stage uses a folded cascode one. The receiver front-end achieves 30-dB voltage conversion gain, 7.3-dB noise figure with 1 noise corner frequency of 70 kHz, 8-dBm input third-order intercept point, and +40-dBm input second-order intercept point. The transmitter front-end shows 12-dB power conversion gain, 0-dBm output power with 10-dBm output third-order intercept point, and 30-dB local-oscilator suppression. The receiver and transmitter front-end dissipate 3.5 and 3 mA from a 1.8-V supply, respectively.Index Terms-CMOS radio, dc offset, driver amplifier (DA), IEEE 802.15.4 transceiver, low-noise amplifier (LNA), low power, 1 noise, passive mixer, transceiver front-end.

A low power direct conversion receiver RF front-end with high in-band IIP2/IIP3 and low 1/f noise

“…The measured NF of the receiver RF front-end is about 6.2 dB when the IF frequency is 10-20 MHz. Consider that the Balun (we use BL2012-10B2045B Balun from ACX) before the LNA induces about 1 dB loss, the noise performance of the RF front-end is superior compared with other implementations in [5][6][7][8][9][10][11]. Although the measured 1/f corner frequency of the RF front-end is not obtained right now, Fig.…”

Zigbee Transmitter Using a Low-Power High-Gain Up-Conversion Mixer

“…장치들 간의 통신을 지속적으 로 지원하기 위하여 저 전력으로 구동하는 요구가 증대 되고 있으며, 이를 이용한 응용 역시 증가하고 있다 [1] . 그 중에서도 IEEE 802.15.4 규격을 만족하는 Zigbee는 실생 활에서도 범용적으로 사용되고 있으며, 저 전력 구동을 위한 노력이 끊임없이 연구되고 있다 [2] . IEEE 802.…”

A 1-V CMOS Ultralow-Power Receiver Front End for the IEEE 802.15.4 Standard Using Tuned Passive Mixer Output Pole

“…The passive mixer core is represented by a variable resistor whose resistance is controlled by a local oscillator (LO) voltage. The current-mode passive mixer core is normally followed by a transimpedance amplifier (TIA) [14], which can easily be modified into a channel-select filter (CSF) [1], [15]. In Fig.…”