A low-power ESD-protected 24GHz receiver front-end with π-type input matching network

This paper presents a full ESD-protected receiver front-end for wireless communications around 24GHz, comprising LNA, mixer, VGA, and on-chip balun. A π -type input matching network incorporating ESD capacitance is constructed to realize the source impedance transformation for higher gain. With it, the gain of the first stage is improved while the noise figure is just degraded slightly. The measured results show an input return loss of less than-12dB, 36dB voltage gain, 6.9dB noise figure, and 2dBm output P
_1dB
. The chip has an HBM ESD robustness of ± 2kV and consumes 34mA from a 1.2V supply with a total area of 1×0.8 mm
²
using 0.13μm RF CMOS process.