A Blocker-Tolerant, Noise-Cancelling Receiver Suitable for Wideband Wireless Applications

A new wideband receiver architecture is proposed that employs two separate passive-mixer-based downconversion paths, which enables noise cancelling, but avoids voltage gain at blocker frequencies. This approach significantly relaxes the trade-off between noise, out-of-band linearity and wideband operation. The resulting prototype in 40 nm is functional from 80 MHz to 2.7 GHz and achieves a 2 dB noise figure, which only degrades to 4.1 dB in the presence of a 0 dBm blocker.