A Low-Power Compact Inductor-less RF Front-end for Sub-1GHz IoT Applications

This paper presents a sub-1GHz RF front-end including a LNA, a PA and an off-chip balun. There is no inductor in either the LNA or the PA, so the layout area of this circuit is small, which is about 0.275mm
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designed in 110nm CMOS technology. For the RX mode, the voltage gain is 26.5dB while the noise figure is about 2.23dB. The S11 parameter is less than -10dBm and the IIP3 is -4.825dBm. For the TX mode, a class-E PA is used to obtain higher efficiency. It can deliver 17.4dBm output power with a power added efficiency (PAE) of 53%. It consumes 4.2mA for the RX mode and 50mA for the TX mode from a 1.5V power supply.