A Universal Receiver for Sub-6 GHz Wireless Applications

Speaker: Hossein Razavi
Affiliation: Ph.D. Candidate

Via Zoom: https://ucla.zoom.us/j/98035773105

Abstract: Today’s mobile devices must support more than 15 cellular and WiFi bands. Radios serving in such an environment require many off-chip front-end filters, occupy a large chip area, and pose severe difficulties in generation and distribution of the local oscillator (LO) signals. With a multitude of receive paths, either each path employs a dedicated synthesizer or the LO signals travel a long distance to reach all of the downconversion mixers. The former option further increases the area, while the latter consumes substantial power. It is therefore desirable to develop a single receive path that can accommodate all of the bands.

In addition to standard receiver (RX) figures of merit, i.e., Noise Figure (NF), Linearity and input matching, this receiver should provide blocker tolerance in the presence of out-of-band (OOB) and harmonic blockers and a synthesizer-friendly LO phase generation.

In this presentation we describe a receiver that achieves wideband low NF, input matching and linearity as well as OOB and harmonic blocker rejection with no need for calibration. We begin with a feedback generalization that leads to a multi-loop topology, capable of handling the flicker noise at 200 kHz bandwidth of GSM while exploiting small baseband transistors that can afford 160 MHz channel bandwidth of WiFi. In the next step, we add channel selection and blocker rejection to this topology. Finally, a new rejection method is proposed for the harmonic blockers that is robust to phase mismatch. To demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed concepts, a prototype has been developed for LTE and WiFi bands in 28-nm CMOS technology. The receiver performs channel selection filtering in the range of 200 kHz – 160 MHz over an RF range of 0.4 – 6 GHz, demonstrates a NF of 2.1 dB in the low noise mode and 4.2 dB in the harmonic rejection (HR) mode. The 0-dBm blocker test indicates a NF of 5.3 dB and 7.1 dB in the low noise mode and the HR mode respectively. The RX achieves an HR3/HR5 > 60.8 dB up to 2 GHz while consuming 49 mW. The prototype employs no inductors and occupies an active area of 1380 µm x 1370 µm.

Biography:  Hossein Razavi received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in electrical engineering from Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran, in 2014 and 2016, respectively. He joined CCL Lab in 2017 as a Ph.D. student. He is the recipient of the UCLA Dissertation Year Fellowship in 2019, Broadcom Foundation Fellowship in 2018, Analog Devices Outstanding Student Designer Award in 2018 and UCLA ECE Department Fellowship in 2017. His research interests are RF and mmWave circuit design for communication systems.

For more information, contact Prof. Behzad Razavi (razavi@ee.ucla.edu)

Date/Time:
Date(s) - Mar 19, 2021
2:30 pm - 4:00 pm

Location:
Via Zoom Only
No location, Los Angeles
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