A receiver for WCDMA/EDGE mobile phones with inductorless front-end in 65nm CMOS

The spectrum allocated for the operation of cellular services is country dependent and fragmented in several frequency bands. Mobile phones, to be usable globally, are therefore required to support many bands. The lack of suitable tuneable pre-selection filters and duplexers mandates the use of a large number of low-noise amplifiers (LNAs) in the receiver section of the transceiver. Minimization of the area occupied by the LNAs is therefore important. Virtually every transceiver for mobile phone applications published to date makes use of LNAs employing on-chip or on-passivation spiral inductors. Spiral inductors are large and do not scale with technology, leading to an increasing relative cost of the receiver front-end with newer technology nodes. Post-passivation and SiP technologies also add noticeably to the costs. In this paper we present the first receiver employing no on-chip or above-passivation spiral inductors on the receive signal path and with a linearity and noise performance suitable for WCDMA/EDGE applications. The eight channel direct-conversion receiver is part of a multimode transceiver requiring neither RX nor TX inter stage SAW filters for FDD 3G operation.