A fully integrated CMOS RF front-end with on-chip VCO for WCDMA applications

Increasing demand on the broadband data transmission via mobile phones drives standards for the third generation cellular phones. Both wide-band CDMA (WCDMA) and CDMA2000 compliant cellular phones make possible full-bandwidth Internet access. A high level of integration is necessary because of low power and low cost requirements, making CMOS implementation attractive. In the WDMA RF receiver, sensitivity, single-tone desensitization, and intermodulation rejection are the key performance indicators and should be minimized by controlling the parameters such as noise figure (NF), input-referred 3/sup rd/-order intercept (IIP3), gain distributions, and voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) phase noise. Because of the high data rate supported by the WCDMA standard, more stringent control over the parameters is required. An on-chip VCO is helpful, because it eliminates I/O buffers and reduces substrate noise injection and power consumption.