A 0.9-8 GHz Highly Linear SAW-Less Direct-Conversion Receiver Front-End for 5G Communication Standard

A broadband SAW-less direct conversion receiver front-end has been designed and implemented in a $0.18 \mu \mathrm{m}$ CMOS process for fifth generation new radio (5G NR) communication standard. The proposed receiver consists of a single-ended low-noise transconductance amplifier (LNTA) driving a current-mode passive mixer terminated by a transimpedance amplifier (TIA). The common source (CS) topology has been employed for LNTA while utilizing a new structure to increase the input matching bandwidth without affecting the noise figure (NF) and linearity of the LNTA. A new technique has been proposed for bandwidth extension of LNTA's transconductance ($G_{m}$). The linearity of the front-end has been improved by utilizing a linearity enhancement technique and using the current-mode topology for the proposed receiver. A high-gain and high-bandwidth operational transconductance amplifier has been proposed to reduce the input impedance of the TIA for improving the linearity. The proposed front-end consumes only 13.5 mW. Over 0.9 GHz – 8 GHz frequency range the receiver achieves a conversion gain more than 27.75 dB, maximum NF of 7.85 dB, maximum S
11
of -10 dB, and 10.4 dBm of IIP3.