This technology is a receiver that incorporates programmable, in-band feed-forward interferer cancellation at the baseband to obtain high linearity and low noise operation at ultra-low supply voltages.
The maximum supply voltage has reduced with technology scaling in recent years, and ultra-low voltage (ULV) CMOS technologies are predicted to become the norm, with supply voltages below 1V. At these voltage levels, existing solutions for canceling unwanted interfering signals become compromised due to the need to prioritize either linearity within the band of interest or noise reduction, without the ability to design for both features. Designs of ULV receivers have been explored, but the linearity and noise limitations are critical obstacles in their adaptation. Thus, further advancement of wireless receivers for cellular and other applications requires receiver circuitry with a low noise floor and a high attenuation of unwanted signals that arise due to RF mixing.
This technology is an ultra-low voltage integrated receiver with feed-forward interferer cancellation operating reliably from 0.55 V to 0.65 V. The ULV receiver achieves high performance that is compatible with cellular communications. To achieve low noise figure and high linearity required for such receivers, this technology uses a robust programmable feed-forward interferer cancellation scheme that decouples the noise and linearity performance. The feed-forward interferer cancellation is made robust using digital calibration, which requires only simple amplitude measurements to be done on downconverted baseband signals. The ease of implementation of the digital calibration and the linearity improvements obtained from the feed-forward interferer cancellation make this architecture desirable for designing high performance receivers from ultra-low voltage supplies.
IR M10-029
Licensing Contact: Greg Maskel