A 2.4GHz front-end with on-chip balun in a 0.13um CMOS technology

A 2.4GHz receiver front-end with on-chip balun implemented with 0.13um CMOS technology is presented in this paper. Based on direct-conversion architecture, the front-end comprises a two-stage LNA (low noise amplifier) with optimized on-chip transformer and quadrature passive mixer. The g
_m
-boosting technique is employed in 1
^st
stage of LNA to achieve low noise and low current simultaneously. In 2
^nd
stage of LNA, g
_m
" compensation is used for linearity improvement. The front-end draws 26.6mA from 1.2V and simulation result shows a DSB NF of 3.5dB with 52 dB conversion gain.