High Performance Building Blocks for SAW-Less Transceivers & Design of Ultra-Low Power Receiver for Wireless Sensor Networks

To keep up with the increasing demand for higher data rates, 5G will introduce new multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) techniques and enhance existing ones such as beamforming and diversity. This, combined with larger bandwidths, more complex modulations and increased number of bands and modes will greatly increase terminal complexity. Presently, to meet the stringent specifications of frequency division duplexing (FDD) cellular standards, for each operating band, a highly selective duplexer (based on surface acoustic wave (SAW) filters) is used to connect receiver and transmitter to the shared antenna. In recent years, various interference mitigation techniques have been introduced with the goal of replacing the off-chip filters with tunable on-chip counterparts, thus significantly reducing system cost and complexity. Nonetheless, given the extremely challenging interference scenario, this is still an open issue. In the first part of this thesis, a highly linear low noise transconductance (LNTA) is proposed to be easily integrated in an advanced wireless receiver with a self-interference cancellation performance that significantly improves state-of-the-art while removing bulky component like SAW filter. The proposed LNTA demonstrated an antenna input referred IIP3 of 27 dBm while consuming only 14 mW and facilitating removing bulky and off-chip components like SAW filter leading to considerably cost benefit. The increasing demand for wearable wireless devices has motivated the research on ultra-low power (ULP) transceivers. Some ULP applications, such as wireless medical telemetry and Wearable-Wireless Sensor Networks (W-WSN) require the portable devices to operate from a single Lithium Ion battery or to use energy harvested from the environment. This makes low supply voltage operation an additional stringent requirement. For WSN, it is especially critical to have a ULP receiver since the sensor is mostly operating in the receive mode rather than in transmit mode. As a consequence, its overall power consumption is determined by the receiver chain. Low Noise Amplifier (LNA) is the first block of the receiver chain and generally considered as one of the most power hungry blocks due to performing simultaneous tasks. In Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) application, the RF spec is very relax in the favor of reducing dissipation power. Thanks to introducing a novel and efficient current reuse technique and also passive gm boosting, the LNA input impedance is reduced by factor of 24 compared to a single transistor using the same current. Hence, the proposed LNA with RF spec which far exceeded the requirements of intended application while consuming only 30 μW is presented in the second part of this thesis. In fact, the, overall performance of the proposed LNA is almost three times better than the stat of the art. Furthermore, thanks to extensively utilizing current reuse scheme and employing forward back gate biasing in advanced technology of 22 nm FD-SOI, it enables to design an ULP receiver for BTLE application. The proposed receiver consumes much less power compared to state-of-the-art receivers and far exceed the requirements of wireless sensor network standards such as BT-LE. It can operate with supply voltage as low as 0.4V while consumes only 100 μW with much smaller chip area, better NF and better linearity compares to the-state-of-the-art.