A 261-µW ultra-low power RF mixer with 26-dBm IIP3 using complementary pre-distortion technique for IEEE 802.15.4 applications

Abstract The wireless mobile communication is being replaced by wireless personal communication due to the advent of the Internet-of-things (IoT). The IoT applications in the 2.4 GHz band face critical trade-off with respect to signal linearity and battery power. The IoT devices require more power to overcome the nonlinear effects in the channel, resulting in rapid discharge of battery. The wireless industry faces a challenge of providing proper signal processing without draining the battery drastically. In this paper, an ultra-low power RF mixer using complementary pre-distortion (CPD) technique is proposed to overcome the trade-off between linearity and power consumption. The proposed CPD based mixer is designed in UMC 180 nm CMOS process, and the post layout simulations using Cadence SpectreRF tool shows an IIP3 of 26.36 dBm and an IIP2 of 137.1 dBm while consuming only 261.6 µW from a 1-V supply. The proposed CPD method gives the better linearity per mW ratio when compared to other recently proposed mixer circuits. The proposed mixer also provides a gain of 11.45 dB while contributing a very low double-sideband noise figure (DSB-NF) of 8.5 dB. The CPD based mixer has a spurious free dynamic range (SFDR) of 91.57 dB which is 10 dB higher than the recently proposed RF front-end while occupying a core area of 0.33 mm2.

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