A Narrowband RF Front End in 22-nm FD-SOI Featuring a Programmable Low-Noise Amplifier with a Configurable Noise-Power Trade-Off

Wireless receivers are usually designed to guarantee a certain performance level in the worst-case operating conditions. However, as these conditions are rarely encountered, the receivers consume more power than necessary to correctly demodulate the incoming signal. This power overhead could be avoided by programmable receivers, which adapt their performance to the conditions of the wireless channel. In this paper, we propose a highly programmable RF front end for narrowband low-power wide-area networks. It trades off a noise figure between 7 and 9dB for a power consumption between 3.65 and 1.81mW thanks to a dynamically programmable low-noise amplifier. Integrated into a LoRa receiver, the proposed programmable RF front end can bring up to 46% of power savings.