2.4-GHz Highly Selective IoT Receiver Front End With Power Optimized LNTA, Frequency Divider, and Baseband Analog FIR Filter

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Abstract
High selectivity becomes increasingly important with an increasing number of devices that compete in the congested 2.4-GHz industrial, scientific, and medical (ISM)-band. In addition, low power consumption is very important for Internet-of-Things (IoT) receivers. We propose a 2.4-GHz zero-intermediate frequency (IF) receiver front-end architecture that reduces power consumption by 2x compared with state-of-the-art and improves selectivity by >20-dB without compromising on other receiver metrics. To achieve this, the entire receive chain is optimized. The low-noise transconductance amplifier (LNTA) is optimized to combine low noise with low power consumption. State-of-the-art sub-30-nm complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) processes have almost equal strength complementary field-effect transistors (FETs) that result in altered design tradeoffs. A Windmill 25%-duty cycle frequency divider architecture is proposed, which uses only a single NOR-gate buffer per phase to minimize power consumption and phase noise. The proposed divider requires half the power consumption and has 2 dB or more reduced phase noise when benchmarked against state-of-the-art designs. An analog finite impulse response (FIR) filter is implemented to provide very high receiver selectivity with ultralow power consumption. The receiver front end is fabricated in a 22-nm fully depleted silicon-on-insulator (FDSOI) technology and has an active area of 0.5 mm². It consumes 370 μW from a 700-mV supply voltage. This low power consumption is combined with a 5.5-dB noise figure. The receiver front end has -7.5-dBm input-referred third-order-intercept point (IIP3) and 1-dB gain compression for a -22-dBm blocker, both at maximum gain of 61 dB. From three channels offset onward, the adjacent channel rejection (ACR) is ≥63 dB for Bluetooth Low-Energy (BLE), BT5.0, and IEEE802.15.4.
Funding Information
  • Analog Devices

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