A low noise analog radio baseband with novel noise shaping circuit techniques

Various wireless standards have emerged in recent years as a result of strong consumer demand for wireless applications. The introduction of digital data communication with digital signal processing has fueled the development of numerous wireless standards and applications ranging from cellular, cordless phones and mobile TV to short range Home RF, Wireless LAN and Bluetooth technologies.;These emerging wireless standards have to be backward compatible with the existing standards. Hence, very strong interferers can coexist in the nearby channels whereas the desired signal in the channel of interest might be very weak. As a result, the classical noise-linearity-power-area tradeoff becomes an even more pronounced challenge in wireless receiver design. Moreover, because of the trend to integrate multiple applications into a single wireless device, the battery life becomes even more significant concern. Hence, any design solution for portable devices must allow a low-power operation. Since device size is also of relatively greater concern in such portable devices, the designs should be reconfigurable for different frequency bands and applications to minimize the component count in the final design.;Most of the existing high performance receiver designs tailor the technology and the classical circuit techniques to achieve good performance for a given application. As the supply voltages decrease, this approach does not remain competitive. Lower supply voltages require lower noise levels to be able to maintain a comparable dynamic range (DR) performance. In most of the integrated receivers a channel select filter is employed to attenuate the near by interferers. Design of a low noise classical filter circuit involves use of large on-chip capacitors, which translates into a large die area. Thus, in order to alleviate the area tradeoff in a high cost deep-sub-micron process, new circuit topologies should be investigated. The work presented in this thesis introduces some innovative noise shaping circuit techniques to enable the transition to a lower supply voltage without incurring the cost of extra area. The novel circuit concepts introduced in this work have been verified by the design and measurement of a 65-nm CMOS test chip. The final baseband chain combining these unique circuit techniques has proven to be a high performance universal radio baseband that can be used for multiple applications with signal bandwidths in the range 700 KHz up to 5.2 MHz.