Design of all passive blocker-tolerant reconfigurable RF front-end filter

This paper presents a tunable active bandpass filter with adjustable notch close to the passband for blocker rejection. The proposed filter is based on two-path signal cancellation and consists of a top-C coupled tunable bandpass filter in parallel with an inductor. The proposed filter is implemented with high-Q N-path filter/resonator blocks in 65-nm CMOS process. The passband of the filter is tunable from 0.4 GHz to 2.2 GHz with a 3-dB bandwidth of 14.4–15.6 MHz, an insertion loss of 3.6–5.8 dB, a noise figure of 3.8–6 dB, and a total power consumption of 12.4–42 mW. Transmission zero is created close to the passband with a minimal offset of 40 MHz and are tunable across a 25 MHz range with up to 54 dB rejection. The blocker 1-dB compression point is 8.5 dBm and the out-of-band IIP3 is 23.5 dBm. The proposed filter provides a promising solution to multi-standard, multi-frequency software-defined radio applications.