Analysis and design of a low-power single-stage CMOS wireless receiver

The thorough analysis and the design of a complete 2.2 GHz quadrature receiver front-end suited for low-power applications is reported in this work. The circuit, built in a 90 nm CMOS process, features a stacked single-ended low-noise amplifier and a self-oscillating mixer. The oscillator LC tank is designed to provide gain at low frequency without decreasing the quality factor at the oscillating frequency. A careful analysis shows that the parasitic capacitances at the output nodes ultimately limit the achievable conversion gain. Measurements show a conversion gain of 27.1 dB with a 14 MHz bandwidth, a noise figure ranging from 12.4 to 13.2 dB with a flicker corner frequency of 200 kHz and an input referred 1 dB compression point of -23.7 dBm. The circuit draws only 1.3 mA from a 1.0 V supply.