High Performance Receiver Design for RX Carrier Aggregation

Carrier aggregation is one of the key features to increase the data rate given a scarce bandwidth spectrum. This paper describes the design of a high performance receiver suitable for carrier aggregation in LTE-Advanced and future 5 G standards. The proposed architecture is versatile to support legacy mode (single carrier), inter-band carrier aggregation, and intra-band carrier aggregation. Performance with carrier-aggregation support is as good as legacy receivers. Contradicting requirements of high linearity and the low noise is satisfied with the single-gm receiver architecture in addition to supporting carrier aggregation. The proposed cascode-shutoff low-noise trans-conductance amplifier (LNTA) achieves 57.1 dB voltage gain, 1.76 dB NF (noise figure) , and −6.7 dBm IIP3 (Third-order intercept point) with the power consumption of 21.3 mW in the intra-band carrier aggregation scenario. With legacy mode, the same receiver signal path achieves 56.6 dB voltage gain, 1.33 dB NF, and −6.2 dBm IIP3 with a low power consumption of 7.4 mW.