An up-conversion TV receiver front-end with noise canceling body-driven pMOS common gate LNA and <i>LC</i>-loaded passive mixer

Abstract

A low noise and highly linear up-conversion digital TV (DTV) receiver front-end, which consists of a noise canceling body-driven pMOS common gate (CG) LNA, a LC-loaded passive mixer, and a surface acoustic wave (SAW) driver, is implemented in a 0.18 µm CMOS process. The pMOS input stage and body-driven technique in the conventional noise canceling capacitively cross-coupled (CCC) CG LNA greatly improve noise figure (NF) over DTV frequency band without extra power consumption. The linearity of the proposed up-conversion LC-loaded passive mixer and modified source follower-based SAW driver is high enough to handle strong blockers without suffering from desensitization. The designed RF front-end shows a measured conversion gain of greater than 17 dB, a NF of less than 2.7 dB, and a third-order input-referred intercept point (IIP3) of greater than −2.7 dBm over DTV frequency band. The power consumption of the proposed RF front-end is 70 mW at a 1.8 V supply voltage.