A 2-V CMOS cellular transceiver front-end

This work presents the design and implementation of a 2-V cellular transceiver front-end in a standard 0.25-mum CMOS technology The prototype integrates a low-IF receiver (low noise amplifier, I/Q mixers, and VGAs) and a direct-upconversion transmitter (I/Q mixers and pre-amplifier) on a single die together with a complete phase-locked loop, including a 64/79 prescaler, a fully integrated loop filter, and a quadrature voltage-controlled oscillator with on-chip inductors, Design trade-offs have been made over the boundaries of the different building blocks to optimize the overall system performance. All building blocks feature circuit topologies that enable comfortable operation at low voltage, As a result, the IC operates from a power supply of only 2 V,while consuming 191 mW in receiver (RX) mode and 160 mW in transmitter (TX) mode. To build a complete transceiver system for 1.8-GHz cellular communication, only an antenna, an antenna filter, a power amplifier, and a digital baseband chip must be added to the analog front-end. This work shows the potential of achieving the analog performance required for the class I/II DCS-1800 cellular system in a standard 0.25-mum CMOS technology, without tuning or trimming.