Design and development of 2 x 2 RF MIMO LNA with improved performance characteristics

Abstract

In this paper, design and development of a 2x2 MIMO RF front end is demonstrated. It has an RF board with commercial transceiver chips and operates at 2.4GHz. In the RF front end the transmitting and receiving paths are separated by using switches. These switches are controlled by transmitter and receiver switches. The signals are then recombined after amplification on both sides. Many advances in radio design and architecture are now allowing for rapid changes in the field of radio design. These changes allow reduction of size, cost, complexity and improve manufacturing by using digital components to replace unreliable and in-accurate analog components. For this to happen, many advances in semiconductor design and fabrication were required and have come to fruition over the last few years. Some of these advances include better integrated mixers, LNA, improved SAW filters, lower cost high performance ADCs and programmable digital tuners and filters.