A 4mW-RX 7mW-TX IEEE 802.11ah fully-integrated RF transceiver

Abstract

An IEEE 802.11ah-compliant RF transceiver with a direct-conversion receiver and a fully-digital polar transmitter is presented. For the receiver, a current-mode RF front-end covers the mandatory modes worldwide from 755MHz to 928MHz. The digitally-assisted analog baseband achieves variable gains and bandwidths with an automatic gain/DC-offset calibration. Implemented in 40nm CMOS with 1V supply, this receiver achieves −104dBm sensitivity in the 1MHz MCS0 mode (i.e., 300kbp/s). It fulfils the adjacent channel rejection requirements with at least 17dB margin. The digital polar transmitter achieves −31dB EVM and 10dB spectral mask margin.