A Widely-Tunable RF Receiver Employing Synthetic Diversity for Interference Mitigation

This paper presents a novel technique for suppression of in-band artifacts from out-of-band (OOB) interference in widely tunable RF receivers. The technique employs a multi-tap inductor-capacitor network (LCN) to generate diversity in gain and phase between taps across the targeted frequency range. Using this network to feed a bank of identical receivers sharing a single local oscillator (LO) allows multiple kinds of interferer artifact to be suppressed. Here we considered spur-induced and phase noise-induced artifacts. In each case, the resulting artifacts are linearly separable from signal when the outputs of the sub-receivers are recombined. AC and transient simulations were first performed to show feasibility of the proposed approach. A prototype was implemented in 45nm CMOS which confirmed the validity of the synthetic diversity (SD) approach for suppressing interferer artifacts, showing a maximum lowering in EVM and BER of 38% and 60% respectively.