A 5.4 mW/0.07 mm2 2.4 GHz front-end receiver in 90 nm CMOS for IEEE 802.15.4 WPAN standard

An integrated 2.4 GHz CMOS receiver front-end according to the IEEE 802.15.4 standard is presented in this paper. It integrates the overall RF part, from the balun up to the first stage of the channel filter, as well as the cells for the LO signal conditioning. The proposed architecture is based on a 6 MHz low-IF topology, which uses an inductorless LNA and a new clocking scheme for driving a passive mixer. When integrated in a 90 nm CMOS technology, the receiver front-end exhibits an area of only 0.07 mm(2), or 0.23 mm(2) when including an input integrated balun. The overall chip consumes 4 mA from a single 1.35 V supply voltage and it achieves a 35 dB conversion gain from input power in dBm to output voltage in dBvpk, a 7.5 dB NF value, - 10 dBm of IIP3 and more than 32 dB of image rejection.