A 4.2 dB NF and 39 dB Passive Gain Ultra-Low Power Receiver Front-End with an RF-IF Dual-Stage Capacitive Stacking Technique

This paper introduces a novel RF-IF dual-stage capacitive stacking technique for ultra-low-power 2.4 GHz receiver front-ends. The gain of the proposed front-end is fully composed of the passive components (i.e., transformer and the switched-capacitor (SC) network), hence has good linearity. Furthermore, an unbalanced topology is adopted in the RF SC section for gain and noise optimization. Fabricated in 22 nm CMOS, this work achieves 11.1 dBm OOB IIP3, 4.2 dB noise figure, and 39 dB passive gain while consuming 360 uW power.