A 0.13-μm Zero-IF CMOS RF Receiver for LTE-Advanced Systems

This paper presents a zero-IF CMOS RF receiver, which supports three channel bandwidths of 5/10/40MHz for LTE-Advanced systems. The receiver operates at IMT-band of 2,500 to 2,690MHz. The simulated noise figure of the overall receiver is 1.6dB at 7MHz (7.5 dB at 7.5 kHz). The receiver is composed of two parts: an RF front-end and a baseband circuit. In the RF front-end, a RF input signal is amplified by a low noise amplifier and Gm with configurable gain steps (41/35/29/23dB) with optimized noise and linearity performances for a wide dynamic range. The proposed baseband circuit provides a −1dB cutoff frequency of up to 40MHz using a proposed wideband OP-amp, which has a phase margin of 77° and an unit-gain bandwidth of 2.04GHz. The proposed zero-IF CMOS RF receiver has been implemented in 0.13-μm CMOS technology and consumes 116 (for high gain mode)/106 (for low gain mode) mA from a 1.2 V supply voltage. The measurement of a fabricated chip for a 10-MHz 3G LTE input signal with 16-QAM shows more than 8.3dB of minimum signal-to-noise ratio, while receiving the input channel power from −88 to −12dBm.