A 36.7 mW, 28 GHz receiver frontend using 40 nm RFCMOS technology with improved Figure of Merit

• Published in: Analog integrated circuits and signal processing 2021-04, Vol.107 (1), p.135-144
• Main Authors: Verma, Ankita, Yadav, Pritesh Kumar, Ambulker, Sunanda, Goswami, Manish, Misra, Prasanna Kumar
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Bandwidths; Bleeding; Carrier frequencies; Circuits and Systems; Electrical Engineering; Engineering; Figure of merit; High gain; Linearity; Low noise; Millimeter waves; MOSFETs; Noise; Noise levels; Noise reduction; Parameters; Power consumption; Signal,Image and Speech Processing; Technology; Topology; Transconductance; Wireless communications
• ISSN: 0925-1030; 1573-1979
• DOI: 10.1007/s10470-020-01792-w

High carrier frequency requirement (Sub 6, 28 GHz) to accomplish the high bandwidth specification for millimeter wave band wireless communication, has reduced the ratio of operating carrier frequency (f c ) and unity current gain frequency (f t ) of MOSFETs in state of the art RFCMOS technology. This poses a challenge for designing a high gain and low noise receiver with better linearity. In an attempt to realize such receiver, this paper presents a 28 GHz receiver front-end in 40 nm RFCMOS technology. It includes 3-stage low noise amplifier incorporating push pull topology, current bleeding down converting gilbert cell based mixer with common gate transconductance stage followed by a standard Gm-C filter. By incorporating these techniques, the performance of the proposed receiver improved in terms of linearity as compared to the state of the art designs. For a comprehensive analysis, the combined effect of performance parameters has been compiled into a single metric i.e. Figure of Merit (FOM). The proposed receiver exhibits conversion gain of 30.5 dB and 2.15 dB noise figure with linearity parameter IIP3 being −21.7 dBm while consuming 36.7mW power resulting in FOM value of 0.27.