A Baseband-Matching-Resistor Noise-Canceling Receiver With a Three-Stage Inverter-Only OpAmp for High In-Band IIP3 and Wide IF Applications

In this article, we propose a baseband noise-canceling receiver architecture to increase in-band linearity. A key feature of the architecture is that all active circuits are in baseband, including the low-noise transconductance amplifier (LNTA). The LNTA operating at baseband frequencies allows the use of feedback to increase the linearity. This article analyzes a tradeoff that exists between in-band linearity and noise in mixer-first receivers and shows how the proposed architecture breaks such tradeoff. The receiver targets high IF bandwidths, enabled by a transimpedance amplifier (TIA) composed of an OpAmp using only inverters. This article describes the stabilization mechanism of this OpAmp with a unity-gain bandwidth (UGB) of 7.6 GHz. The receiver is fabricated in 22-nm FDSOI CMOS. The measured results show an in-band IIP3 of > 9 dBm for an IF bandwidth of 175 MHz with sub-5-dB noise figure (NF) across 1-6-GHz local oscillator (LO) frequencies.