Green design techniques for RF front-end circuits

In the near decade, following the advances in CMOS technology, RF CMOS circuits have been extensively applied in consumer products and wireless communication systems. Meanwhile, the demand of green design mechanism is becoming more and more important for circuit designs. This paper proposes the green design strategies for RF circuits, such as PA, LNA, mixer, and VCO. The design strategies focus on not only the low power consumption with reused bias current but also the small chip area for low spurious environment contamination. For the low-power design, some published literatures have been adopted the operation voltage from 3V down to only 0.2V, to save the dissipated dc power from tens mW to several hundreds of μW. Additionally, many design strategies and green figures of merit (GFOM) are also presented and proposed in this paper, for the future green RF circuit design.