Design of a CMOS RF front end receiver in 0.18?m technology

by Sastry, Vishwas Kudur

An RF front end receiver system refers to the analog down conversion stages of the wireless communication system. The Digital base-band signals cannot be transmitted directly through wireless channels due to the properties of electromagnetic waves. The baseband signals need to be converted to analog through a digital-to-analog converter (DAC), up converted to higher frequency using an up conversion mixer and then transmitted through the channel. The received signals are down converted to base band frequency and then converted to digital again using the analog to digital converter (ADC). The processes which the analog signal undergoes at the RF front end include amplification, mixing and filtering. The RF Front End receiver developed in this thesis makes use of a differential low noise amplifier (LNA) with center frequency at 1.75GHz.The incoming RF signal undergoes amplification by the LNA and is down converted by a Gilbert double balanced mixer to a first Intermediate frequency (IF) of 250 MHz A second Gilbert Double Balanced Mixer down converts to a low second IF of 50 MHz The local oscillator signal for the mixer is generated using a voltage controlled ring oscillator (VCO).The entire front end of the receiver was created in Cadence virtuoso schematic editor using CMOS 0.18?m technology. The total power consumed by the RF Front End Receiver is 113.36 mW.