A Low Voltage Low Power RF Receiver Front-End

A low voltage low power RF receiver front-end at 900 MHz ISM band is described. It includes a self-biased inverter low noise amplifier (LNA) and a switched transconductance (switched-g_m) mixer. The current-reuse technique is employed to achieve a high gain with restricted current consumption in the design of LNA. The mixer adopts switched-g_m, current-reuse and dynamic threshold voltage techniques for low voltage low power applications. The RF receiver front-end was fabricated and measured in 180nm CMOS process. The measurement results show the RF receiver front-end achieves a conversion gain of 22.5 dB with S11 < -10 dB in the 840~960 MHz band, a single side band noise figure of 8.5 dB, and an input referenced third intercept point of -10.1 dBm with only 2 mW power consumption from 0.8 V supply.