A Four-Phase Passive Mixer-First Receiver With a Low-Power Complementary Common-Gate TIA

This paper presents a four-phase passive mixer-first receiver using a common-gate (CG) trans-impedance amplifier (TIA), instead of a conventional shunt-feedback amplifier. The four-transistor TIA used in this work combines current-reuse with cross-coupled g
_m
-boosting to achieve a reduced noise figure (NF) at low power levels. Moreover, complementary derivative-superposition (CDS) linearization within the TIA helps to improve the linearity with no additional power overhead. A prototype receiver is implemented in a 180 nm CMOS technology. The receiver operates from 0.3 to 1.3 GHz with a conversion gain of 21.9 dB. In measurements, the receiver achieved a noise figure of 5.8 dB and an in-band (IB) IIP3 of +7.2 dBm while consuming 0.34 mW power per TIA at 1 GHz. The measured spurious-free dynamic range (SFDR) at 1 GHz is 76.9 dB.