A CMOS wideband front-end chip using direct RF sampling mixer with embedded discrete-time filtering

A CMOS wideband front-end IC is demonstrated in this paper.It consists of a low noise transconductance amplifier (LNTA) and a direct RF sampling mixer (DSM) with embedded programmable discrete-time filtering.The LNTA has the features of0.5~ GHz wideband,wideband input matching and low noise.The embedded filter following the DSM operates in discrete-time charge domain,filtering the aliasing signals and interferences while controlling the IF bandwidth according to the clock frequency.The measured NF of the front-end was below 7 dB throughout the whole band from 0.5 to 6 GHz.It shows a conversion gain of 12.6 dB and IP1dB of—7.5 dBm at 2.4 GHz.It occupies a chip area of 0.23 mm2 and consumes 14 mA DC current.