A mm-Wave Blocker-Tolerant Receiver Achieving <4 dB NF and-3.5 dBm B1dB in 65-nm CMOS

Digital beam-forming requires highly linear receivers (RXs), as null steering is performed only in digital baseband (BB). This paper presents a highly linear RX, with a high out-of-band (OOB) blocker tolerance without sacrificing performance or power, utilizing a highly linear inverter low-noise amplifier (LNA), followed by an N-path mixer with tunable filtering properties and a BB transimpedance (TIA) amplifier for linearity enhancement. The N-path mixer design trade-offs are discussed, and several linear LNA topologies are presented and compared. A chip prototype was manufactured in a TSMC 65 nm CMOS process. In our implementation, a <4 dB noise figure (NF) is achieved, with an RX gain of 40 dB, in-band (IB) IIP3 of -20 dBm and -3.5 dBm B1dB at a 500 MHz offset, while occupying an active area of 1.62 mm(2) and drawing a total power of 76.8 mW, at a frequency range of 22-31 GHz.