RF System Design of an RFIC Receiver for IoT

Internet of Things (IoT) is being talked about everywhere and one of the key pieces of the system is an RFIC transceiver (radio) that helps transmit/receive information over the air (a popular band being 2.4 GHz). Often, designing an RFIC transceiver involves breaking down the specifications to the block level of various blocks like LNA, VCO, PLL, Mixers, filters, etc. But, even before we do that, we need to treat the receiver as a black box, understand the environment it will operate in and do a higher level system design of the whole receiver chain.