A wide band CMOS radio frequency RMS power detector with 42-dB dynamic range

A wide band radio frequency (RF) root-mean-square (RMS) power detector (PD) is presented in this paper. A CMOS rectifier with unbalanced source-coupled pairs and auxiliary capacitors is utilized to constitute the reverse received signal strength indicator (reverse-RSSI) architecture as proposed power detector with operating frequency from 300 MHz to 10 GHz. The auxiliary capacitors are introduced to improve linearity at high input power dramatically. The power detector can be connected to power amplifier without directional coupler due to the capacitor attenuation array. Simulation results show that the maximum detection power is as high as +30 dBm and dynamic range reaches more than 42 dB with ±1 dB error. The proposed power detector is implemented in a standard 180nm CMOS process with 0.113 mm2 core area. The supply voltage is 3.3 V, and its static power consumption is 0.55 mW.