A 7.6-mW IR-UWB Receiver Achieving −17-dBm Blocker Resilience With a Linear RF Front-End

This article presents a low power, linear RF front-end (RF-FE) for an 802.15.4a/z compatible impulse-radio ultrawideband (IR-UWB) receiver. A complementary topology-based LNA is proposed with a bandpass filter (BPF) integrated into its output. The LNA includes a complementary common gate (CCG) stage to isolate the BPF from the undesired loading of the LNA’s input stage to achieve a high Q and 5- to 10-GHz tuning range. This CCG stage relaxes a trade-off between headroom and linearity. Furthermore, capacitive and transformer coupling techniques are proposed in the LNA to increase its OP1dB and second-order intermodulation (IM2) by 4 and 27 dB, respectively, compared to noncomplementary counterparts without these techniques. An automatic feedback-based back-gate biasing technique is proposed for the variable gain transconductance amplifier (VGTA) following the BPF to increase VGTA’s transconductance range for a given width over length (W/L). The receiver is fabricated in a 22-nm fully depleted silicon on insulator (FDSOI) CMOS. The measured results over the 5- to 10-GHz RF frequency range show a minimum noise figure (NF) of 6 dB and a blocker resilience of −17 dBm at 7.6-mW power dissipation.