Instinctual Interference-Adaptive Low-Power Receiver With Combined Feedforward and Feedback Control

Highly adaptive, instinctively interference-tolerant radio frequency (RF) receivers are in high demand today. To achieve high-interference robustness at low average power, receivers need to be dynamically configured to operate in low-power mode in the absence of interference and a high-power interference-tolerant mode as an “instinctual” response to the blocker. In this letter, we present an interference-adaptive receiver with a control loop and on-board commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components that adapt a 2-6-GHz low-noise amplifier (LNA) from a low-power mode (-10-dBm P
_{1 dB,IN}
and ≈ 280-mW power) to high-linearity mode (1.5-dBm P
_{1 dB,IN}
and ≈ 1.4-W power) where the linearity is increased by 11.5 dB ( > 14×) with a 5× increase in consumed power. With no interference, the control loop automatically brings the LNA back to the low-power mode.