A 2.4/5 GHz Dual-Band Low-Noise and Highly Linear Receiver With a New Power-Efficient Feedforward OPAMP for WiFi-6 Applications

Abstract

This paper presents a 2.4/5 GHz dual-band low-noise and highly linear receiver (RX) for IEEE 802.11a/b/g/n/ac/ax applications. The RX employs an RF front-end architecture composing a balun-low-noise transconductance amplifier, current-mode passive mixers, and transimpedance amplifiers (TIAs) to achieve compactness, low noise, and high linearity. A novel power-efficient feedforward operational amplifier architecture was also implemented in the TIA design to achieve the target RX error vector magnitude (EVM) of less than −35 dB with modulation and coding scheme 11 and 1024 quadrature amplitude modulation. Fabricated in a 22-nm SOI CMOS process, the RX achieved noise figures of 2.1/4.2 dB, in- band input-referred third-order intercept points of −11.8/−7.5 dBm, EVMs of −46.4/−44.6 dB for the 2.4/5 GHz bands, respectively. It drew a bias current of 21 mA from a nominal supply voltage of 0.8 V. The active die area was 0.65 mm2.

Keywords

• Dual-band
• error vector magnitude
• feedforward operational amplifier
• power-efficient
• receiver
• transimpedance amplifier