Low Power, Dual Mode Bluetooth 5.1/Bluetooth Low Energy Receiver Design

This paper presents a low-power Bluetooth 5.1 (BT5.1) and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) compliant receiver (RX). The receiver has two modes of operation: a low-power mode, and a high-performance mode. It utilizes various techniques for low power consumption at both system and circuit levels. For example, it uses a Low-IF mixer-first architecture to optimize power consumption at system level. In addition, it uses harmonic down-conversion in the low-power mode to enable quadrature local oscillation generation. Circuit-level power minimization techniques include using reduced supply voltages, 500 mV for the VCOs and 700 mV for the front end, using passive mixers, and reusing the biasing currents. The proposed receiver utilizes an integrated configurable matching circuit. The proposed receiver is implemented in 65-nm CMOS technology and occupies an active area of 0.55 mm2 consuming only 697 μW and 1250 μW in low- power mode and high-performance mode, respectively. The low- power RX mode achieves a noise figure of 12.82 dB and an IIP3 of +5.58 dBm. The high-performance RX mode achieves a 6.3-dB noise figure and +2.6-dBm IIP3. The proposed receiver achieves better than 65 dB image rejection.