A design and simulation methodology for radio frequency receiver front-ends with frequency selective limiting devices

Abstract It has recently been shown that emerging frequency selective limiter (FSL) devices allow to suppress interference with high power levels in the same frequency band as desired signals. This paper introduces an FSL model for circuit simulations that was validated with measurement results of a prototype FSL device. An RF front-end was constructed with this FSL model and a transistor-level CMOS low-noise amplifier (LNA) design. A co-simulation methodology has been developed under large-signal interference considerations using the Bluetooth Low-Energy (BLE) standard as a representative example. Results from simulations with a two-tone signal confirm that the modeled FSL can provide a 9.4 dB reduction of the third-order intermodulation distortion (IMD3) components, which benefits resilience to interference.