A Direct Conversion Frontend With Bandwidth Extension and Linearity Enhancement for 5G Receivers

ABSTRACT In this paper, a new frontend for 5G receivers is proposed. In the presented work, a new bandwidth enhancement technique for low‐noise transconductance amplifiers and for wireless frontends has been proposed. The proposed frontend achieves low noise figure (NF) by using a noise cancelation scheme in the newly proposed LNTA. The linearity of the frontend is also improved by increasing the DC gain and the bandwidth of the opamp used in the transimpedance amplifier and by exploiting a linearity improvement method for the LNTA. The frontend has been implemented in a standard 0.18 μm CMOS process. The post‐layout simulation results prove the gain of 38 dB with less than 3 dB deviation in the pass‐band over a 6.5 GHz bandwidth. The results also show that NF is less than 8 dB, the worst‐case IIP3 is −2 dBm, the maximum S 11 is equal to −9.5 dB while the frontend consumes 9.95 mW DC power from a single 1.8‐V supply, and the occupied area is 0.813 mm 2 .