A 0.6–1.8-mW 3.4-dB NF Mixer-First Receiver With an N-Path Harmonic-Rejection Transformer-Mixer
Stephen Weinreich, Boris Murmann
Abstract
This article presents a low-power passive mixer-first receiver (MFRX) with an N-path harmonic-rejection (HR) transformer-mixer for narrowband Internet-of-Everything (IoE) applications. Composed of only switches and capacitors, the N-path HR transformer-mixer integrates the behavior of a transformer and harmonic recombination into the passive mixer itself, providing voltage gain, HR, and high- <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$Q$ </tex-math></inline-formula> filtering before any active components. A prototype RX in 22-nm fully-depleted silicon-on-insulator (FD-SOI) occupies 0.064 mm2 and operates from 300 MHz to 3.0 GHz while consuming 0.6–1.8 mW. It achieves 3.4–4.8-dB noise figure (NF), 14–18-dBm out-of-band (OB)-input-referred third-order intercept point (IIP3), −5–0-dBm OB-B1dB, −8/−3-dBm H3/H5-B1dB, and < 1-dB NF degradation with a −15-dBm OB blocker.