Gain, NF and IIP3 Budgeting of LTE Receiver Front End

This paper discusses several radio design issues and presents a systematic approach towards receiver budgeting for LTE standard. IIP3 and noise figure, both showing opposite trends with respect to gain, are the two key parameters considered for budget allocation among the receiver front end modules. 1-dB compression point and IIP3 requirements are deduced from the given LTE specification and trade-offs have been made between linearity and noise requirement to achieve the best possible solution for each sub-system in the receiver. With the approach presented in this paper, we could assign a gain value of 10 dB for LNA which resulted total noise figure of 4.9 dB that is well below the required specification. In addition, 14 dBm is found to be the best feasible value for IIP3 of the mixer and that has also been verified to satisfy the LTE requirements.