A 1.9 GHz silicon receiver with on-chip image filtering

Abstract

A 1.9 GHz fully monolithic silicon superheterodyne front end receiver is presented; it consists of an LNA, a tunable image reject filter and a Gilbert cell mixer integrated in one die. The chip was fabricated using NORTEL's 0.5 micron bipolar technology with 25 GHz f/sub t/. The receiver was designed to operate with a 1.9 GHz RF and a 2.2 GHz L.O. For a 300 MHz IF. Measured performance for the complete receiver (packaged) was: conversion gain 33.5 dB, noise figure 4.9 dB, input IP3-28 dBm, 50 dB image rejection (tuned to reject a 2.5 GHz image frequency) and 15.9 mA current consumption at +3 V. The image rejection can be tuned from 2.4 GHz to 2.63 GHz. A new version with improved linearity is in fabrication.