Design of coplanar waveguide on-chip impedance-matching circuit for wireless receiver front-end

Recently, spiral inductors have widely been used instead of resistors in the design of matching circuits to enhance the thermal noise performance of a wireless transceiver. However, such elements usually have low quality factor (Q) and may encounter the self-resonance in microwave-frequency band which permits its use in higher frequencies, and on the other hand, they occupy the large on-chip space. This paper presents a new design theory for the impedance-matching circuits for a single-chip SiGe BiCMOS receiver front-end for 2.4 GHz-band wireless LAN (IEEE 802.11b). The presented matching circuits are composed of conductor-backed coplanar waveguide (CPW) meanderline resonators and impedance (K) inverter. The prototype front-end receiver is fabricated and measured. A few of the measured results to verify the design theory are presented