A Broadband Inductor-Less CMOS Receiver Architecture with Noise-Cancellation for Compact RF Front-Ends

Abstract

This paper presents a broadband inductor-less CMOS receiver architecture that eliminates on-chip inductors while maintaining wideband impedance matching and acceptable noise performance. The proposed receiver integrates an inductor-less low-noise amplifier (LNA) and an active mixer to achieve compact implementation and reduced parasitic sensitivity; the LNA employs a combined common-gate and common-source topology with a noise-cancellation scheme under a current-reuse configuration, and a modified Gilbert-cell mixer performs single-ended to differential conversion with controllable conversion gain without passive baluns. Designed in a 0.18-µm CMOS technology with a 1.8-V supply, post-layout simulation results demonstrate broadband operation from 0.4 to 2 GHz, achieving a conversion gain of 14.2-17.2 dB and a noise figure of 11.5-13.8 dB with the measurement buffer enabled, while the intrinsic front-end exhibits a minimum noise figure of 6.55 dB. The proposed architecture provides a practical trade-off among bandwidth, noise performance, linearity, and power consumption for highly integrated broadband RF front-end applications.