A Low Power SAW-less 2.4-GHz Receiver with an LC Matched Series N-path Filter

This paper presents a low power SAW-less 2.4-GHz receiver for short-range communications. To ensure sufficient out-of-band (OOB) linearity for SoC existence, a LC matched series N-path filter based receiver topology is proposed. The radio frequency input is followed by the LC matched series N-path filter, which provides sufficient ultimate rejection when consuming less power than conventional N-path filters. An on-chip inductor and a capacitor are utilized to achieve input matching and improve the NF. Implemented in TSMC 40nm LP process, the chip occupies an active area of 0.312 mm
²
. Simulation results show that the receiver consumes 2.2 mW from 1.1V supply voltage with a NF of 6.3 dB (with the on-chip inductor) and a voltage gain of 38.4 dB. The baseband achieves a third order filtering response with 1.5 MHz bandwidth. The OOB 1-dB compression point is +7 dBm and the OOB IIP3 is +22 dBm.