Performance Analysis of SiGe HBT-Based N-Path Receiver Without Nonoverlapping LO Signal

This paper presents the performance analysis and comparison between silicon germanium heterojunction bipolar transistor (SiGe HBT)-based and field effect transistor (FET)-based N-path receiver architectures under the application of sinusoidal local oscillator (LO) signals. Although nonoverlapping LO signals are typically advised for the N-path structure to minimize noise figure (NF), generating these signals at mm-wave frequencies is challenging, and can be quite costly due to high power consumption, activated parasitic capacitance, and tuned resonances at millimeter wave (mmW) frequencies, and design complexity. Conversely, implementing overlapping sinusoidal LO signals at high frequencies can be achieved with relative ease. In the case of easily implementable sinusoidal LO, SiGe HBT-based N-path architecture shows better resilience against the NF degradation mostly caused by overlapping LO signal, compared to FET-based architecture. A SiGe HBT-based N-path receiver was fabricated in 130 nm SiGe BiCMOS technology which shows the PldB of -3.9 dBm, NF of 16.5 dB at 28 GHz when utilizing standard sinusoidal LO signal.