Design Methodology of N-Path Filters With Adjustable Frequency, Bandwidth, and Filter Shape

In this paper, an adaptive N-path filter design technique is presented. The filter designed by this method can be reconfigured to different shapes, e.g., Butterworth or Chebyshev with variable bandwidth (BW), based on the user requirements. In addition, an analytical synthesis procedure is introduced to realize high-order bandpass filters (BPFs) based on N-path architecture with a prescribed set of specifications. A proof-of-concept BPF is fabricated and measured in a 65-nm CMOS process. The filter can be reconfigured to realize different filter shapes by changing coupling capacitors. The BW of the proposed filter is also tunable. The passband of the filter is tunable from 0.2 to 1.2 GHz with a gain of 14.5-18 dB, a noise figure of 3.7-5.5 dB, and a total power consumption of 37.5-52.7 mW. The channel BW can be varied from 20 to 40 MHz and the filter out-of-band third-order intercept point (Δf=50$ MHz) is 25 dBm.