Design of a low-cost integrated RF front-end for a modulated-wideband-converter based receiver

This paper presents a low-cost multi-stage mixing process for a modulated-wideband-converter based compressive sensing receiver. Through theoretical analysis and simulations, this mixer architecture can achieve broadband down conversion by a low-speed local-oscillator (LO) random sequences. The design of proposed RF front-end, consisting of an LNA and three-stage mixers, is implemented based on a 0.13 μm RF CMOS process. The common-source negative feedback LNA is designed to operate in DC to 7 GHz. The chip is taped out and tested. From measurements, this front-end can handle DC to 4.5 GHz input frequency, providing measured system conversion gain of −16 to 3 dB and normalized mean square error (NMSE) of −27 dB for down converted 5 MHz WCDMA signals.