Design of a CMOS UWB receiver front-end with noise-cancellation and current-reuse

The design of an ultra-wideband (UWB) CMOS receiver front-end that integrates a broadband single-ended low-noise amplifier (LNA) and a quadrature downconversion balun-mixer is presented. Noise-canceling technique is employed in the LNA to decouple input match from noise figure (NF). To be directly driven by the LNA, the balun-mixer has a single-ended input double-balanced topology. For low power consumption, both the LNA buffer and the active balun are embedded in the mixer design with bias current reused. Drawing 21 mA from 1.5V, the receiver front-end simulates a voltage conversion gain of 29 dB with an input IP3 of -14 dBm. Over the 3.1-10.6 GHz UWB band, an NF of 4-5.1 dB and an S
₁₁
<;-10 dB are obtained.