A low-power RF direct-conversion receiver/transmitter for 2.4-GHz-band IEEE 802.15.4 standard in 0.18-[micro]m CMOS technology

This paper presents a low-power RF receiver/transmitter front-end for 2.4-GHz-band IEEE 802.15.4 standard in 0.18-[micro]m CMOS technology. An RF receiver comprises a single-ended low-noise amplifier, a quadrature passive mixer, and a transimpedance amplifier. A current-mode passive mixer showing a very good 1/f noise performance is adopted to convert an RF signal directly to a baseband signal. Moreover, this type of passive mixer shows high-linearity performance, leading to overall RF receiver linearity improvement. A low-power, high-linearity transmitter front-end is implemented by using a passive mixer and two-stage driver amplifier in which the first stage is a conventional cascode amplifier and the second stage uses a folded cascode one. The receiver front-end achieves 30-dB voltage conversion gain, 7.3-dB noise figure with 1/f noise corner frequency of 70 kHz, -8-dBm input third-order intercept point, and +40-dBm input second-order intercept point. The transmitter front-end shows 12-dB power conversion gain, 0-dBm output power with 10-dBm output third-order intercept point, and -30-dB local-oscilator suppression. The receiver and transmitter front-end dissipate 3.5 and 3 mA from a 1.8-V supply, respectively. Index Terms--CMOS radio, dc offset, driver amplifier (DA), IEEE 802.15.4 transceiver, low-noise amplifier (LNA), low power, 1/f noise, passive mixer, transceiver front-end.