Recent Advances and Design Trends in Cmos Radio Frequency Integrated Circuits

Several state-of-the-art wireless receiver architectures are presented including the traditional superheterodyne, the image-reject heterodyne, the direct-conversion, and the very-low intermediate frequency (VLIF). The case studies are followed by a detailed view of receiver building blocks: lownoise amplifiers (LNA), mixers, and voltage-controlled oscillators (VCO). Two popular topologies currently exist for LNAs: the common-gate configuration, which offers low power consumption with superior stability, robustness and linearity performance, and its common-source counterpart, which provides comparatively higher gain and lower noise figure. Aside from the traditional passive and active Gilbert mixers, the even-harmonic and masking-quadrature mixers are developed to combat second-order non-linearity and improve image-rejection, respectively. For quadrature carrier generation, the degeneration-injected QVCO is superior to the cascode-injected QVCO both in terms of phase noise and tuning range. The Colpitts QVCO is attractive as a low-noise alternative as it does not disturb the output voltage as much as its traditional LC counterpart and thus offers lower phase noise.