Design of wideband sub-harmonic receiver front-end using 0.18-µm BiCMOS technology

A low-power sub-harmonic receiver front-end covering an RF frequency range of 18-21GHz with a converted IF range of 50-1550 MHz is demonstrated. The transformer-based inductive coupled resonators at the input of low-noise amplifier provide a wideband signal transformation and impedance matching effectively. Also, several circuit techniques such as G_M boosted and 3D-inductors are employed for the LNA and mixer to achieve high circuit performance. The proposed receiver is fabricated using 0.18-μm SiGe BiCMOS technology with a total power consumption of 60 mW. Measured results show that the conversion gain is of 36 dB featuring an excellent gain flatness (±1dB) with the IF bandwidth up to 1.5 GHz, noise figure lower than 8.5 dB, and output P_1dB compression point higher than 3 dBm for the IF frequency, respectively.