Single-stage subharmonic quadrature RF front-end

This paper proposes a low-power single-stage subharmonic (SH) quadrature RF front-end receiver which merges subharmonic mixer, and quadrature voltage-controlled oscillator (QVCO) called SH-QMV cell. The transconductance stage of the subharmonic mixer is simply stacked on top of the parallel coupled QVCO to reduce the power consumption. Using a 65 nm CMOS technology, the proposed SH-QMV cell is optimized for the phase noise performance. Oscillating at around 2.4 GHz, the phase noise of the proposed SH-QMV cell is -49 dBc/Hz, -76 dBc/Hz, and -98 dBc/Hz at 10 kHz, 100 kHz, and 1 MHz offset frequency, respectively. The simulated voltage conversion gain of the SH-QMV is about 24 dB. The double side-band (DSB) noise figure is about 5.5 dB at 100 MHz intermediate frequency (IF). The SH-QMV cell consumes 0.52 mW dc power from a 1-V supply.