A low power 2.4 GHz front end with MEMS lattice based channel filtering at RF

In this work, a sub sampling receiver front end at 2.4 GHz with high Q filtering to perform channel selection at RF is presented. A low power solution for channel selection directly at RF is proposed in this work using “pseudo-self-biased” inverter amplifier with a BAW resonator lattice as a load to realize high selectivity. This work focusses on the Bluetooth LE standard, however the front-end can be used for any protocol standards for radios working at 2.4 GHz. A low power BAW based digitally controlled oscillator (DCO) is used as a reference to a LC PLL to perform channel selection. An integer divided version of the BAW DCO signal is used as clock for the sub-sampler to down-convert the selected channel from “super-high IF” to baseband in quadrature. The proposed architecture is designed in 0.18µm CMOS process and validated using ELDO-RF simulations.

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