A SAW-Less GSM/GPRS/EDGE Receiver Embedded in 65-nm SoC

A Blocker-Tolerant, Noise-Cancelling Receiver Suitable for Wideband Wireless Applications

“…Table I compares the FTNC-RX prototype with other recently published blocker-tolerant receivers. The first two works are wideband receivers [6], [8]- [10], while the third work is a state-of-art SAW-less narrowband receiver [22], [23]. Even when compared to the narrowband receiver, the FTNC-RX shows improved effective small-signal noise figure and comparable blocker performance at lower power consumption.…”

A highly selective LNTA capable of large-signal handling for RF receiver front-ends

“…SAW-less receivers proposed in [1] and [2] attempt to conform to the blocking profile requirements as specified by 3GPP or other similar standardizations. As an example, a GSM receiver should withstand a 0-dBm continuouswave (CW) blocker at 20 MHz away from 850/900 MHz bands and at 80 MHz away from PCS/DCS bands.…”

“…1, usually have superior performance in tolerating large blockers. Although, in this configuration, due to the small LNTA output load impedance, the linearity bottlenecks at the output of the LNTA are relaxed [1], the LNTA input (or any intermediate node) needs to tolerate large blockers as well. In this paper, a highly selective LNTA with a large-signal handling capability is proposed in the context of the current-mode RX architectures.…”

“…IMPROVING B 1dB AND NF OF PUSH/PULL CLASS-AB CG LNTA USING HQ-BPFS A core block of the LNTA proposed here is a push/pull common-gate (CG) amplifier, which is inspired from [4], with its bias tuned for class-AB operation under large signal conditions. The class-AB operation is beneficial since it relaxes the constraining universal trade-off between the power consumption and large dynamic range (or linearity) that exists for typical class-A amplifiers [1], [4]. Because of the class-AB push/pull operation, a large B 1dB of +22 dBm has been reported in [4] for the CG LNTA (assuming a 0-Ω load impedance), demonstrating its potential for large-signal operation.…”

“…According to this equation, provided that |Z L | ≫ 8R s , the noise contribution from Z L and the second stage, hence the overall NF, can be minimized. In addition, by increasing Z L , g m,LN T A increases and the noise contribution of the stages following the LNTA can be suppressed [1].…”