A mm-Wave Blocker-Tolerant Harmonic-Resilient N-Path Mixer-First Receiver with 6.2 dB NF and 5 dBm OOB-B1dB

With an increasingly congested wireless spectrum, widely tunable, highly linear receivers are desirable to avoid occupied bands and withstand strong out-of-band (OOB) interference. N-path circuits provide wide tunability, high-Q LO-tracking filtering on their RF ports, and high OOB linearity with acceptably low NF [1]–[3]. N-path mixer-based receivers with N>4 phases, (e.g., N=8 phases) also provide harmonic suppression, with lower NF, due to reduced loss and noise injection from harmonic sidebands [2]–[3]. However, N-path circuits to date, especially with N>4, require heavily duty-cycled LO waveforms, usually generated by CMOS logic, which restrict most high dynamic-range designs to sub-6 GHz operation [1]–[3].