Performance trade-offs in designing a dual-band CMOS IEEE 802.11A/B frontend

This work describes trade-offs involved in designing a dual-band CMOS frontend for wireless local-area network (WLAN). Three 0.18/spl mu/m CMOS frontends have been investigated, a single-band frontend at the 2.4 GHz ISM band, a single-band frontend at the 5 GHz U-NII band and a dual-band frontend. The study shows that employing a dual-band frontend yields satisfactory results, although some compromises regarding the performance in the lower frequency band have to be made.