A 40nm CMOS Ultra-Wide Output Power Range Bluetooth RF Front-End for Hydropower Management System

This article presents a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) Transceiver RF front-end with low power consumption and ultra-wide controllable output power range. The receiver includes a low-noise amplifier (LNA) followed by four-phase passive mixers and a trans-impedance amplifier (TIA). The transmitter has a direct upconversion architecture, including a double-balanced mixer and a Class E power amplifier (PA) with ultra-wide output power range. Implemented in 40-nm CMOS, the LNA exhibits a gain of more than 20-dB, a noise figure of 3.6-dB, an Input Third Order Intercept Point (IIP3) of -17dBm, over a frequency range of 2.4 to 2.5 GHz. The passive mixers are driven by 25% duty-cycle, non-overlapping quadrature local oscillator (LO). The wide output power range of -50dBm to 10dBm adapts to the 60dBc changes of signal strength.