Research And Design Of Key Circuits In RF Front-End Module In Wideband Receiver

Wireless communication has developed rapidly over the past few decades while various wireless devices have been playing a significant role in modern life.The market calls urgently for multi-functional wireless terminals to satisfy different applications,which has made wideband receiver a critical researching direction.As people become more and more dependent on wireless devices,these terminals have to be smaller and more portable.However,the evolution of wireless terminals has complicated their RF blocks.Consequently,highly-integrated front-end modules(FEM)have become a preferable choice for RF architecture.As for the process used in RF design,silicon-on-insulator(SOI)technology has been more and more popular for its excellent high-frequency performance and fairly low cost.Based on Global Foundries 130-nm SOI CMOS technology,the key blocks in Rx FEM,namely low-noise amplifier(LNA)and RF switch,are designed and researched in this thesis.The tape-out work has been accomplished while the design strategies are demonstrated by the CoB testing.A differential common-source LNA based on local active feedback is presented to meet the target of wide bandwidth,low noise,and small die size.Different from the traditional active feedback structure,a new feedback node is chosen to broaden the bandwidth and improve the linearity.Current-reuse and noise-canceling techniques are also utilized to obtain better circuit performance.Besides,cross-capacitor-coupling is introduced to further broaden the bandwidth.Implemented in GF 130-nm SOI CMOS technology,the proposed LNA achieves a 3-dB bandwidth of 0.5-3.5 GHz with good input and output matching.A peak voltage gain of 20.5 dB is obtained.The minimum NF is 3.49 dB while the maximum IIP3 is-6 dBm.The chip area of this inductorless design is only 0.031 mm2.The power consumption is 15.2 mW under a supply voltage of 1.5 V.A single-pole-four-throw RF switch with body self-biasing technique has been reported to satisfy the request of low loss and high linearity.A diode-connected body biasing strategy is utilized to realize dynamic self-biasing and simplify the controller.To improve the linearity,the ac voltage on a single transistor is decreased significantly by using the multistack FET topology.And a negative biasing strategy is also intro-duced to upgrade the power-handling capability.Fabricated in GF 130-nm SOI CMOS technology,the proposed RF switch works under a single positive voltage supply without any external negative voltage source.In the chip-on-board test,the proposed switch exhibits an insertion loss of 0.2-0.49 dB and isolation higher than 20 dB up to 3 GHz.A 0.1-dB compression point of 38.5 dBm is demonstrated.And the 2nd/3rd harmonic is higher than 93 dBc/76 dBc for 35-dBm input power.With excellent per-formance over the frequency band from 0.5-3.0 GHz,this RF switch can be used in GSM,WCDMA,and LTE bands.