Low-power switched transconductance mixer and LNA design for Wi-Fi and WiMAX applications in 65 nm CMOS

This study proposes a wide-band low-power low-noise amplifier (LNA) and switched transconductance (SwGm) mixer. The proposed mixer is realised with a fully differential complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) SwGm configuration. It provides a high bandwidth with a low noise figure (NF) and consumes a low amount of power. Moreover, an ultra-wideband LNA is designed by using a split-load inductive technique. The combination of the LNA and the mixer has provided competitive results in terms of power, bandwidth, NF, and gain. The LNA + mixer was designed and fabricated in the 65 nm radio frequency-CMOS technology. The proposed LNA achieves 2.5 ± 0.1 dB of NF and 17 ± 1.5 dB of gain over the band of 1-10 GHz and consumes 4.8 mW of power. The proposed SwGm mixer shows a maximum conversion gain (CG) of 10 dB, a minimum NF of 10 dB, and more than -8.5 dBm of third-order input intercept point (IIP3) over the band of 10 GHz. The implemented LNA + mixer achieves 19 dB of CG, 5 dB of NF, and -6 dBm of IIP3. The on-chip LNA and mixer consume only 1.65 mW and 530 μW, respectively, from a 1.2 V supply voltage. © The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2018.