A 16 nm FinFET 0.4 V inductor-less cellular receiver front-end with 10 mW ultra-low power and 0.31 mm2 ultra-small area for 5G system in sub-6 GHz band

This work presents an inductor-less 0.4 V cellular receiver (RX) front-end with an ultra-low power of 10 mW and an ultra-small area 0.31 mm2 in 16 nm FinFET technology, which enables massive receivers in a single chip for 10 Gb/s high throughput 5G system in sub-6 GHz band. The proposed inductor-less low-Vdd RX front-end consists of an LNA, passive mixers, LO generator and 20MHz bandwidth channel filters. By using the proposed current stabilization circuit in 0.4 V channel filter, the current variation with process corners is greatly reduced. This RX front-end can achieve a noise figure of 2.5dB, an in-band IIP3 of −6 dBm, a voltage gain of 35 dB at 2.1 GHz Band-I frequency. To the best of authors' knowledge, this work demonstrates the lowest power consumption with minimum chip area and a competitive performance under the lowest supply voltage of 0.4 V, compared with the prior arts.