9.3 A very-low-noise frequency-translational quadrature-hybrid receiver for carrier aggregation

To meet the demands of ever-increasing data throughput, carrier aggregation (CA) across frequency bands is becoming necessary. Different regional spectrum allocations lead to a large number of band combinations and challenge the antenna interface performance for inter-band CA. A dedicated antenna for each carrier severely increases the form factor of the device. Splitting the antenna signal with filter banks becomes very complex and costly due to the large number of band combinations. Existing wideband receiver architectures like FTNC [1] have excellent noise figure (NF) but cannot easily handle CA while current inter-band CA receivers [2,3] use separate antennas. We present a frequency-translational quadrature-hybrid (FTQH) receiver architecture that allows RF signal sharing between receivers; FTQH receivers can further be daisy-chained to share a single antenna among multiple receivers while maintaining excellent RF impedance matching and low NF.

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