A dual-band direct-conversion RF front-end for WiMedia UWB receiver

This paper describes a direct-conversion RF front-end designed for a dual-band WiMedia UWB receiver. The front-end operates in band group BG1 and BG3 frequencies. It includes multi-stage LNAs, down-conversion mixers, a polyphase filter for quadrature local oscillator (LO) signal generation, and LO buffers. The UWB receiver is targeted for a mobile handset, where several other radios can be simultaneously on. Therefore, special attention was paid on minimizing the interference from different wireless systems. The front-end achieves approximately 26-dB gain and 4.9–5.6-dB noise figure (NF) across three sub-bands of BG1. In BG3 mode it obtains 23–26-dB gain and 6.9–7.7-dB NF. The front-end consumes 48.1 and 42.7 mA from a 1.2-V supply voltage in BG1 and BG3 operation modes, respectively. The chip was implemented in a 0.13-μm CMOS.