CMOS Nanoswitch for RF Frontend

A transmit/receive (T/R) switch is essential for radio-frequency (RF) front-end to connect the transmitter or the receiver to a common antenna. This paper proposes a nanoswitch that is designed in the Silterra 130 nm complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) process for 2.4GHz ISM-band RF applications. The nanoswitch exhibits a 1dB insertion loss, a 28.6dB isolation, and a 35.8dBm power-handling capacity in the transmit mode; whereas, for the 1.8 V/0V control voltages, a 1.1dB insertion loss and a 19.4dB isolation were demonstrated with an extremely-low power dissipation of 377.14μW in the receive mode. Active inductor-based resonant circuit, body floating, transistor W/L optimization, and isolated CMOS structure were adopted for the compact nanoswitch with a very small die area of 0.02mm².