A single-in-differential-out CMOS RF front-end for UWB 6–9GHz applications

An integrated ultra-wideband CMOS RF front-end for UWB 6–9 GHz application is presented in this paper. A single-in-differential-out gain controllable low noise amplifier and a current-reuse bleeding IQ merged quadrature mixer are integrated as the RF front-end. This ESD protected module is implemented in TSMC 0.13µm RF CMOS process and the post-layout simulation results shows that it achieves a high voltage gain of 23.7–25.1dB and a low voltage gain of 10–12.4dB, an averaged total noise figure of 4.6–5.1dB while operating in the high gain mode and an in-band IIP3 of −6.7dBm while the low gain mode. This RF front-end consumes 22.4mA from a 1.2V supply voltage.