A Single Chain 800M/1.8G/2.4GHz Multistandard Transceiver With Multibranch Transformer for Low-Cost IoT Applications

• Published in: IEEE transactions on circuits and systems. II, Express briefs Express briefs, 2022-12, Vol.69 (12), p.4684-4688
• Main Authors: Chen, Qian, Luo, Zelu, Deng, Huan, Zheng, Xinfa, You, Xiaodong, Cao, Pengyi, Xing, Xinpeng, Feng, Haigang, Wang, Zhihua
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Baluns; Chains; Internet of Things; Low cost; low-power; Mixers; multi-band; multi-frequency; multi-standard; power mixer; receiver; reconfigurable; Switches; Topology; transceiver; Transceivers; transformer; Transformers; transmitter; Transmitters
• ISSN: 1549-7747; 1558-3791
• DOI: 10.1109/TCSII.2022.3196434

An 800M/1.8G/2.4GHz multi-band multi-standard single chain transceiver is presented to support terminals under NB-IoT, BLE and ZigBee protocols. The multi-branch co-wound transformer structure co-designed with RF front-end blocks (i.e., LNA & Power Mixer) is proposed and adopted for compact and efficient in-out matching with moderate Q value. Such co-designed topology enables the single transceiver chain to cover wide-spreading frequency ranging over three times of its minimum band frequency, without compromising performance. The measurement shows that, in receiver chain, the sensitivity is better than −102 dBm, consuming less than 20mW, in transmitter chain, the EVM is 4.63% and 5.2% for NB-IoT multi-tone 12-tone transmission with 0dBm output power in LB and MB. The transceiver has been implemented in 65nm CMOS process, with 1.5mm^{2} and 0.6mm^{2} for receiver and transmitter, respectively. The design is consistent with the requirement of low-cost multi-standard Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications.