Design and Verification of On-Chip Impedance-Matching Circuit Using Transmission-Line Theory for 2.4 GHz-Band Wireless Receiver Front-End

Recently, spiral inductors have widely been used instead of resistors in the design of matching circuits to enhance the thermal noise performance of a wireless transceiver. However, such elements usually have low quality factor (Q) and may encounter the self-resonance in microwave-frequency band which permits its use in higher frequencies, and on the other hand, they occupy the large on-chip space. This paper presents a new design theory for the impedance-matching circuits for a single-chip SiGe BiCMOS receiver front-end for 2.4 GHz-band wireless LAN (IEEE 802.11b). The presented matching circuits are composed of conductor-backed coplanar waveguide (CPW) meander-line resonators and impedance (K) inverter. The prototype front-end receiver is designed, fabricated and tested. A few of the measured results to verify the design theory are presented. key words: CPW line, impedance-matching circuit, 2.4 GHz-band wireless LAN, λ /4 resonator, transmission-line theory