A Switchless Zigbee Frontend Transceiver With Matching Component Sharing of LNA and PA

This letter presents a low power and low cost RF transceiver for Zigbee standard (IEEE 802.15.4) using a switchless front-end configuration. It is enabled by designing the matching networks that a low noise amplifier and a power amplifier can share. The transceiver has been implemented in 1P6M 0.18 μm CMOS process. The receiver achieves 4.4 dB NF, -6.5 dBm IIP3 and 25.7 dB gain with 3-step digital gain controllability, while drawing 4.9 mA from 1.8 V power supply. The power amplifier dissipates 5 mA from 1.8 V power supply at 3 dBm output power and 16.5% EVM at worst, having 21 dB digital gain controllability. The die area is 1 mm × 1 mm.