A low power ka-band receiver front-end in 0.13μm sige bicmos for space transponders

In direct-to-earth or deep space communication links, providing energy is very expensive and therefore it is essential for the link receiver to consume very low power while providing high sensitivity and gain. This paper presents a low power 0.13 ¿m SiGe Ka-band receiver where the current sharing technique is used to reduce the power consumption of the front-end to 5.8 mW while providing 17 dB of RF-IF conversion gain, double side band noise figure less than 8.9 dB across the bandwidth, and -1dB input referred compression point of -25 dBm.