Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) Direct Down Conversion Receiver Front End in 65nm CMOS Technology

This paper presents a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) based receiver that features a low power LNA and a novel passive AND function mixer. The entire receiver is designed and simulated in the TSMC 65nm planar CMOS technology. The receiver benefits from a direct down conversion technique where the baseband signals are separated into I/Q paths based on the phase of the signal. The overall input sensitivity of the receiver is around -65 dBm, whilst the system has an overall noise figure (NF) of 8dB. The overall conversion gain of the system is 17.5 dB and the entire receiver consumes 2.85 mW.