0.18 μm SiGe BiCMOS microwave/millimeter-wave dual-mode dual-conversion receiver architecture with a tunable RF channel selection at low-flicker-noise microwave mode

A dual-mode receiver architecture with tens-MHz channel bandwidth at microwave mode and GHz channel bandwidth at millimeter-wave mode is demonstrated in this work with a tunable active filter for RF channel selection at microwave mode using 0.18 μm SiGe BiCMOS technology. A dual conversion is employed to accommodate the wide-channel-bandwidth 60-GHz mode at the first conversion stage and the high-level-modulation 5-GHz mode is merged to the second conversion stage through sharing the 5-GHz switchable Gilbert IQ mixers with the 60-GHz mode. A tunable RF active filter is inserted between the 5-GHz LNA and the second stage mixer to serve as RF channel selection at the 5-GHz mode with the ability of relaxing the stringent linearity requirement imposed by high-level-modulation scheme. 10 dB gain with a 2-GHz channel bandwidth at the 60-GHz mode and 23 dB gain with a 20 MHz channel bandwidth within the 600 MHz tuning range at 5-GHz mode are demonstrated with a low-flicker-noise corner of less than 60 KHz at the 5-GHz mode because of the use of SiGe HBT as the IQ Gilbert mixer cores at the second conversion stage.