SiGe Analog AGC Circuit for an 802.11a WLAN Direct Conversion Receiver

This brief presents a baseband automatic gain control (AGC) circuit for an IEEE 802.11a wireless local area network (WLAN) direct conversion receiver. The whole receiver is to be fully integrated in a low-cost 0.25-mu m 75-GHz SiGe bipolar complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (BiCMOS) process; thus, the AGC has been implemented in this technology by employing newly designed cells, such as a linear variable gain amplifier (VGA) and a fast-settling peak detector. Due to the stringent settling-time constraints of this system, a feedforward gain control architecture is proposed to achieve fast convergence. The proposed AGC is composed of two coarse-gain stages and a fine-gain stage, with a feedforward control loop for each stage. It converges with a gain error of below +/- 1 dB in less than 3.2 mu s, whereas the power and area consumption are 13.75 mW and 0.225 mm(2), respectively.