A 0.13 μm CMOS UWB RF Transmitter with an On-Chip T/R Switch

This paper presents a fully integrated 0.13 μm CMOS MB-OFDM UWB transmitter chain (mode 1). The proposed transmitter consists of a low-pass filter, a variable gain amplifier, a voltage-to-current converter, an I/Q up-mixer, a differential-to-single-ended converter, a driver amplifier, and a transmit/receive (T/R) switch. The proposed T/R switch shows an insertion loss of less than 1.5 dB and a Tx/Rx port isolation of more than 27 dB over a 3 GHz to 5 GHz frequency range. All RF/analog circuits have been designed to achieve high linearity and wide bandwidth. The proposed transmitter is implemented using IBM 0.13 μm CMOS technology. The fabricated transmitter shows a -3 dB bandwidth of 550 MHz at each sub-band center frequency with gain flatness less than 1.5 dB. It also shows a power gain of 0.5 dB, a maximum output power level of 0 dBm, and output IP3 of +9.3 dBm. It consumes a total of 54 mA from a 1.5 V supply.