Tutorial: Fundamentals of Modern RF Receivers

To be compliant with multi-standard applications, the RF front-end of a modern transceiver must satisfy several challenging tasks such as large operative bandwidth, low noise, and high linearity. Over the years, addressing such requirements has significantly changed the radio architecture towards an ultimate solution based on current signal processing and passive mixers. In this tutorial, after a brief description of the typical structure of a receiver, the main properties that the radio must satisfy will be defined. After that, voltage and current signal processing will be compared showing why a fully current-mode approach is more suitable in deep-scale technologies. The tutorial will end by describing the most popular RF front-end architectures with a particular emphasis on the noise-canceling technique and the Class-AB solutions.