A differential low-voltage high gain current-mode integrated RF front end for an 802.11b WLAN is proposed.It contains a differential transconductance low noise amplifier（Gm-LNA） and a differential current-mode 0 down converted mixer.The single terminal of the Gm-LNA contains just one MOS transistor,two capacitors and two inductors.The gate-source shunt capacitors,Cx1 and Cx2,can not only reduce the effects of gate-source Cgs on resonance frequency and input-matching impedance,but they also enable the gate inductance Lg1,2 to be selected at a very small value.The current-mode mixer is composed of four switched current mirrors.Adjusting the ratio of the drain channel sizes of the switched current mirrors can increase the gain of the mixer and accordingly increase the gain of RF receiver front-end.The RF front-end operates under 1 V supply voltage.The receiver RFIC was fabricated using a chartered 0.18μm CMOS process.The integrated RF receiver front-end has a measured power conversion gain of 17.48 dB and an input referred third-order intercept point（IIP3） of-7.02 dBm.The total noise figure is 4.5 dB and the power is only 14 mW by post-simulations.
A new,low complexity,ultra-wideband 3.1-10.6 GHz low noise amplifier(LNA),designed in a chartered 0.18μm RFCMOS technology,is presented.The ultra-wideband LNA consists of only two simple amplifiers with an inter-stage inductor connected.The first stage utilizing a resistive current reuse and dual inductive degeneration technique is used to attain a wideband input matching and low noise figure.A common source amplifier with an inductive peaking technique as the second stage achieves high flat gain and wide -3 dB bandwidth of the overall amplifier simultaneously.The implemented ultra-wideband LNA presents a maximum power gain of 15.6 dB,and a high reverse isolation of—45 dB,and good input/output return losses are better than -10 dB in the frequency range of 3.1-10.6 GHz.An excellent noise figure(NF) of 2.8-4.7 dB was obtained in the required band with a power dissipation of 14.1 mW under a supply voltage of 1.5 V.An input-referred third-order intercept point(IIP3) is -7.1 dBm at 6 GHz.The chip area,including testing pads,is only 0.8×0.9 mm2.
