A novel CMOS distributed receiver front‐end for wireless ultrawideband receivers

An ultrawideband CMOS distributed receiver front‐end utilizing cascade gain cell structure is designed in Jazz 0.18‐μm CMOS process.The proposed distributed front‐end, fully integrating a low‐noise amplifier (LNA) and mixer together, demonstrates 11.5–14 dB gain, 5–6.5 dB noise figure and more than 9‐dB RF/LO return loss over 2–17 GHz with a fixed IF frequency of 500 MHz and LO power of 5 dBm. The entire circuit occupies 1.7 × 1.0 mm 2 including on‐wafer pads and consumes 170 mA from 1.8‐V voltage supply. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 52: 1790–1792, 2010; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/mop.25316