A Low Power Folded RF Front-End with Merged LNA and Mixer for ZigBee/Bluetooth

A folded RF front-end with merged LNA and mixer is designed in 0.25 μm CMOS process for low power applications. The designed low power RF front-end uses the folded and current reuse techniques. It consumes 13.8 mW from 1.7 V supply voltage, while 5.2 dB NF and 25.7 dB conversion gain are achieved. By using PMOS in the switching stage of the folded mixer, low flicker noise of 7 dB at 10 kHz is also achieved. The proposed RF front-end can be used in direct conversion receiver for a relatively narrow bandwidth system.