Design of 2.4-GHz Low-IF Receiver and Direct Up-Conversion Transmitter in Deep N-well CMOS Technology

Abstract

The IEEE Std 802.15.4, which is an IEEE standard for a low-rate wireless personal area network (LR-WPAN), established the goal of ultra-low complexity, low-cost, and extremely low-power wireless connectivity among inexpensive fixed, portable, and moving devices. Because its service is designed to be a short-range service without infrastructure, and able to support very large networks, both transmit and receive functions can and must consume little power and have a low operating cost. Therefore, a low-power single-chip radio will have to be integrated with digital modem blocks for low cost. Compared with MOSFET, the BJT (Bipolar Junction Transistor) devices have many desirable characteristics for analog applications including RF, namely, much smaller 1/f noise, much better device-to-device matching, larger transconductance, easier biasing, and easier impedance matching, and so forth. For this reason, RF and analog circuit designers usually prefer the use of BJT over MOSFET and most state-of-the-art radio chips have been fabricated using BiCMOS processes where the high performance vertical Si/Ge BJT is used for RF circuit and CMOS for logic. However, the BiCMOS process has several drawbacks that the cost is expensive, the period of process development is long, the foundry service is very limited, and the performance of BiCMOS digital circuits is inferior to that of CMOS ones. As a result, this process may be unsuitable for the implementation of low cost single chip radio. Continuous advances in CMOS technology provide both good RF circuits and digital VLSI at very low cost. At present, most semiconductor integrated circuits in the market are based on CMOS technology. The reason for this popularity is that the continuous scaling of CMOS technology provides the low cost and low power consumption and reasonably symmetrical complementary transistors are inexpensive in CMOS technology. Deep submicron CMOS technology has been regarded very plausible for a higher inte...