Search

In this brief, a blind background calibration technique for super-regenerative receivers (SRRs) is presented. The proposed calibration scheme is designed to help SRRs to maintain their high sensitivity and immunity to negative transconductance (${\mathrm {-}\mathrm {G}}_{\mathrm {m}}$) variations under process-voltage- temperature (PVT) variations. Unlike the conventional foreground ${-\mathrm {G}}_{\mathrm {m}}$ variations calibration techniques that require interruption of the receiver input, the proposed calibration technique employs input signal statistics and does not require interruption of the input bit-stream for extraction of the errors. The proposed scheme is based on an adaptive algorithm that compares the probability distribution of the pseudorandom-input (PI) stream and the output of the super-regenerative oscillator (SRO) and forces them to coincide at the end of the calibration. The proposed technique is implemented using a mixed-signal detection circuit and a finite state machine (FSM) that drives an 8-bit successive approximation register (SAR) to adjust the compensation current in the SRO. The simulation results successfully verify the effectiveness and reliability of the proposed calibration technique and show significant improvements in terms of SRR sensitivity under different process corners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a driver amplifier with high bandwidth-power efficiency, high capacitor-driving capacity, and low total harmonic distortion (THD). One complementary differential pair composed of self-cascode transistors is incorporated to obtain a full input voltage swing. Flipped voltage follower (FVF) buffers are applied as second stage to drive the last class-AB output stage. Moreover, a dual-loop active-feedback frequency compensation (DLAFC) is presented, which can stabilize the proposed multistage amplifier and keep the dominant pole on high frequency to obtain high-frequency total harmonic distortion (THD) suppression. To achieve a low-frequency phase margin protection (PMP), one left half-plane (LHP) zero is introduced to compensate for the nondominant pole caused by the load capacitor. Meanwhile, two high-frequency LHP zeros are injected to achieve high-frequency phase margin boosting (PMB) and reduce the amplifier's settling time and integration area. This proposed amplifier is implemented in a standard DBH 0.18 μm 5 V CMOS process, and it achieves over 115-dB DC gain, 150–300 MHz GBW under 0–100 p load capacitors, ultra-high THD2,3 suppression ranges from 100 kHz to 10 MHz under 1–2 V output swing, and over 250 V/μs average slew rate, by only dissipating 12.5 mW at 5 V power supply. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A process-voltage-temperature (PVT)-robust, low power, low noise, and high sensitivity, super-regenerative (SR) receiver is proposed in this paper. To enable high sensitivity and robust-PVT operation, a fast locking phase-locked-loop (PLL) with initial random phase error reduction is proposed to continuously adjust the center frequency deviations of the SR oscillator (SRO) without interrupting the input data stream. Additionally, a concurrent quenching waveform (CQW) technique is devised to improve the SRO sensitivity and its noise performance. The proposed SRO architecture is controlled by two separate biasing branches to extend the sensitivity accumulation (SA) phase and reduce its noise during the SR phase, compared to the conventional optimal quenching waveform (OQW). The proposed SR receiver is implemented at 2.46 GHz center frequency in 180 nm SMIC CMOS technology and achieves better sensitivity, power consumption, noise performance, and PVT immunity compared with existent SR receiver architectures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]