A Quantized Analog RF Front End

A surface acoustic wave (SAW)-less receiver with a quantized analog RF front end is presented. The front end is composed of 100 smaller unit front ends, each one dedicated to process only a portion of the input signal. This allows the compression point of the structure to be increased beyond the voltage supply and to reconfigure the dynamic range to fit different operative conditions. A prototype integrated in 65-nm CMOS is presented, where the 1-dB compression point can go up to 10.5 dBm under 0.8-V supply, while the noise figure can be lowered down to 1.5 dB. The RF front end and the baseband burn 14 mW, while clock generation and distribution burn 37.2 mW/GHz. Upon the configuration, IIP3 varies between 1 and 20.5 dBm, while IIP2 between 35 and 75 dBm with a single-ended structure. The third- and fifth-order harmonic rejections are over 40 and 47 dB, respectively. The active area is only 0.25 mm
²
.