A low-power 2.4 GHz receiver front-end employing 3× subharmonic mixing technology

Abstract

This paper presents a 2.4 GHz receiver front-end employing a 3× passive subharmonic mixer and a polyphase filter (PPF) to achieve low power consumption. We proposed a new subharmonic mixing technique in this study to design the mixer. Given that the generation of multiphase local oscillators (LO) is challenging in passive subharmonic mixing, we proposed a new PPF that can generate the LOs at lower cost compared to previous works. Consequently, a standard LC oscillator can work in conjunction with this receiver front-end. This work is designed with 65 nm CMOS technology and the post-simulation shows the power consumption of this receiver is 340 μW, noise figure is 6.27 dB and IIP₃ is -27.3 dBm.