Blocker-tolerant wideband noise-canceling receiver

Abstract

Because of associated disadvantages of narrow-band off-chip radio-frequency (RF) filtering, a mixer-first receiver front-end designed to tolerate blockers with minimal gain compression and noise factor degradation is disclosed. The mixer-first receiver front-end includes two separate downconversion paths that help to minimize added noise and voltage gain prior to baseband filtering, which are critical factors in eliminating narrow-band off-chip RF filtering.

Description

technical field [0001] This application relates generally to RF receivers, and more particularly to RF receiver front ends. Background technique [0002] In radio frequency (RF) receiver design, there are two commonly applied front-end architectures; namely, homodyne and heterodyne architectures. The homodyne architecture downconverts the desired channel directly from RF to baseband, while the heterodyne architecture downconverts the desired channel to one or more intermediate frequencies (IFs) before downconverting to baseband. Typically, each of these front-end architectures often utilizes an antenna to receive RF signals, a band-pass filter to suppress out-of-band interference in the received RF signal, a low-noise amplifier (LNA) to provide gain to the filtered RF signal, and Apply one or more down conversion stages. [0003] Every component in the receiver front end, such as those mentioned above, adds noise to the overall system. The noise of a component can be char...

AI Technical Summary

Problems solved by technology

This directly adds to the noise figure and degrades the sensitivity of the RF receiver

Second, these filters always add cost and board area, especially in multiband applications where multiples of these filters may be required (e.g., one for each supported frequency band)

SAW filters are not compatible with the SDR concept because they are narrowband and their passband is usually not programmable

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