A 0.8–3 GHz mixer-first receiver with on-chip transformer balun in 65-nm CMOS

This paper describes a wide-band receiver designed to be connected directly to a single-ended non-50 ohm antenna. The receiver is based on a four-phase mixer-first architecture and it includes an on-chip transformer balun. Reconfigurability in the balun extends the low-end operation band by 300 MHz. This design demonstrates that with an on-chip balun it is possible to achieve comparable performance to a similar receiver with an external high-performance balun. The receiver is implemented in 65-nm CMOS and it operates in 0.8-3 GHz band with 40 dB gain and 7 dB noise figure.