Subharmonic single-balanced LMV with bottom LO injection

Abstract

Abstract This paper proposes a subharmonic single-balanced RF receiver front-end (called LMV) where low noise amplifier is stacked on top of a differential voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) to re-use the dc bias current. In this subharmonic (SH) LMV, the VCO itself plays the role of the single-balanced subharmonic mixer while generating an LO signal. This bottom LO SH LMV has good LO to IF and LO to RF leakage performances. Also, it can reduce the die size on a chip since it requires only one inductor for the VCO instead of two in the case of top LO LMV. Oscillating at around 2.4\xa0GHz band, the proposed SH LMV is designed using a 65\xa0nm CMOS technology and compared to the top LO SH LMV in terms of phase noise, conversion gain and double sideband noise figure. The SH LMVs consume about 160\xa0μW dc power from a 1-V supply.