A high speed, high conversion gain RF envelope detector for SRO-receivers

A high speed and high conversion gain envelope detector (ED) is designed for RF super-regenerative-oscillator (SRO) receivers. To reduce glitches from RC filtering used for common mode signal rejection, the proposed ED is implemented using a band-pass buffer as a first stage. To avoid introducing excessive time delay and maintain good performance under high data rate, the proposed design introduces back-to-back inverters operating in linear mode to enhance the conversion gain while reducing the settling time. Simulation results using 0.18um CMOS technology shows that the proposed ED achieves a high data rate of 6.66Mbps while consuming 8.45μW.