Wideband VHF and UHF RF Front-End Receiver for DVB-H Application

Abstract

This paper presents a wideband and low-noise direct conversion front-end receiver supporting VHF and UHFbands simultaneously. The receiver iscomposed of a low-noise amplifier (LNA), a down conversion quadrature mixer, and a frequency divider by 2. The cascode configuration with the resistor feedback is exploited in the LNA to achieve a wide operating bandwidth. Four gain-step modesare employed using a switched resistor bank and a capacitor bank in the signal path to cope with wide dynamic input power range. The verticalbipolar junction transistors are used as the switching elements in the mixer to reduce 1/f noise corner frequency. The proposed front-end receiver fabricated in 0.18 mu m CMOS technology shows very low minimum noise figureof 1.8 dB and third order input intercept pointof -12dBm inthe high-gain mode of 26.5 dBmeasured at 500 MHz.The proposed receiverconsumeslow current of 20 mA from a 1.8 V power supply.