Low-noise ESD-protected 24 GHz receiver for radar applications in SiGe:C technology

This paper presents a low-noise ESD-protected 24 GHz receiver in Infineon's B7HF200 SiGe technology. The fully differential circuit integrates a Low Noise Amplifier (LNA), two low-noise mixers and polyphase filters for on-chip quadrature generation. The front-end has been designed to meet high robustness requirements for industrial or automotive applications. It offers ESD hardness of 1.5 A Transmission Line Pulse (TLP) failure current on the RF pins, which corresponds to HBM protection above 2 kV. Furthermore, the performance variation of key parameters has been analyzed in measurement over a wide range of temperatures from −40 °C to 125 °C. The receiver offers a conversion gain of 21.5 dBand a very low noise figure of 3.1 dB at the center frequency of 24 GHz. The circuit exhibits a linearity of −20.5 dBm and −11 dBm input-referred 1dB compression point and IIP3, respectively. The front-end consumes 39 mA from a single 3.3 Vsupply. The chip area including pads is 1 mm2.