A 365-µW 915-MHz & 2.45-GHz Flexible Mixer-First Discrete-Time-Receiver Front-End

This paper presents a highly flexible low-power mixer-first discrete-time (DT) receiver (RX). The combination of "mixer-first" and "discrete-time" designs realizes a new versatile architecture that can support multiple bands defined mainly by the clock generation. Here, the RX is tested for two ISM bands for IoT applications: 915 MHz and 2.45 GHz. The RX was fabricated in TSMC 28-nm LP CMOS and achieves competitive performance in both bands. Although consuming merely 365 µW, it occupies only 0.415 mm<sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> despite the on-chip LC network. The DTRX achieves IIP3 of -4 dBm in-band, +10 dBm out-of-band, and noise figure (NF) below 15 dB without requiring any external components. These features make the architecture very appealing for IoT applications.