A 65nm CMOS current-mode receiver front-end

This paper briefly analyses the noise, bandwidth and linearity performance advantage of nanometer CMOS current- mode circuits compared to their voltage-mode counterparts and proposes a new current-mode receiver front-end targeting low- power wideband wireless applications. The proposed 65nm CMOS current-mode receiver front-end comprises a current- mode LNA, and passive mixers, and covers all WiMAX/LTE bands from 700MHz to 5.8GHz. The front-end achieves an IIP3 of 5 dBm, NF of 3.7-5dB while consuming 2.8mW from a 0.9V power supply. The analysis and simulation results show that the current-mode techniques are very good candidates for wireless applications in low-voltage nanometer CMOS technologies.