Zigbee transmitter using a low‐power high‐gain up‐conversion mixer

Abstract

This article introduces a direct‐conversion CMOS RF transmitter for the IEEE 802.15.4 standard with a low‐power high‐gain up‐conversion mixer designed in 0.18 μm process. The designed RF direct‐conversion transmitter (DCT) is composed of differential digital to analog converter, passive lowpass filter, quadrature active mixer, and drive amplifier. The most important characteristic in designing RF DCT is to satisfy the 2.4 GHz Zigbee standard in a low power consumption. The quadrature active mixer integrated in the proposed RF DCT provides enough high gain as well as sufficient linearity using a gain boosting technique. The measurement results for the proposed transmitter show very low power consumption of 7.8 mA, output power more than 0 dBm, and adjacent channel power ratio of −30 dBc.