A 1.92mW 1.6-to-3.2GHz Third-Harmonic Blocker-Tolerant Receiver Front-End Using Dual Current-Reuse N-Path LNA and Band-Switchable Balun

This paper presents an ultra-low power third-harmonic blocker-tolerant receiver (RX) using dual current-reuse N-path low noise amplifier (LNA) and band-switchable balun. The proposed RX front-end uses I&Q third-harmonic mixing based on non-overlapping 12-phase local oscillator (LO), which reduces the operating frequency and tunable range of RF source by 6 times to save the power of LO generator. A dual current-reuse N-path LNA is proposed to reduce the LNA power consumption by half without sacrificing out-of-band suppression. Moreover, the trade-off between bandwidth matching and high-Q selectivity is broken under extremely low power consumption by combining band-switchable balun and N-path LNA. The RX is designed in a 40 nm CMOS process with a core area of 0.69 mm². The simulated results indicate that the RX achieves wideband tunable high-Q selectivity from 1.6 to 3.2 GHz with the double sideband (DSB) NF from 3.8 to 4.4 dB and +12.2 dBm out-of-band (OB) IIP3 at 100 MHz offset. Over the frequency range of interest, total RX power consumption is 1.52 to 1.92 mW, with the LO driver requiring only 0.19 mW/GHz.