A 2.8-4.3 GHz Simultaneous Dual-Carrier Transformer-Coupled Passive Mixer-First Receiver Front-End Supporting Blocker Suppression

This paper presents a high dynamic range N-path passive mixer-first receiver architecture capable of simultaneously down-converting two arbitrary bands through a single RF port. The architecture consists of two passive mixers arranged in a series configuration with a transformer front-end to minimize cross-loading between mixers while still providing impedance transparency and associated interference suppression for both bands. The receiver was fabricated in a 16nm FinFET process and operates from 2.8-4.3 GHz. The measured noise figure (NF) is 6.8-9.7 dB with 25-28mW of power consumption per channel. In single-carrier operation, the architecture enables additional blocker suppression and improves the out-of-band (OOB) blocker compression (B1dB) from 8.9 to 14.4dBm and input-referred 3rd order intercept point (IIP3) from 18.6 to 27.6 dBm.