A Multi-band CMOS RF Front-end for 4G WiMAX and WLAN Applications

Chetty Garuda, Student Member, IEEE and Mohammed Ismail, Fellow, IEEE
Analog VLSI Lab, The Ohio State University Columbus, OH, USA {garudac, ismail}@ece.osu.edu

AbstractIn this paper, we present the design and implementation of the RF Front-end for the WiMAX (802.16e) and WLAN (802.11n) standards. The front-end covers the frequency ranges of operation for licensed and unlicensed bands of WiMAX and WLAN, which include 2.3 GHz 2.9 GHz, 3.3 GHz 3.7 GHz and 4.9 GHz 5.9 GHz. The gain of the front-end is between 30 - 32 dB for all the bands while achieving noise figures of 2.5 dB, 3.5 dB and 5.9 dB at the center frequencies of the lower, middle and upper bands respectively. The total front-end operates at the bias current of 26.25 mA and consumes 48 mW of power. The components include in the front-end are Low Noise Amplifier, Active Balun or Single to Differential Converter and Mixer. The design of the front-end is performed in 1.8 V IBM CMOS 0.18m process.

operations depending upon the environment. This allows greater efficiency there by reducing the cost and congestion in the commercial licensed bands. In the coming sections, we present the details about the design and implementation of the RF front-end that supports both WiMAX and WLAN spectrum. The design is aimed to match the performance requirements from the overall system analysis for a directconversion receiver. II. RF FRONT-END DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION

I. INTRODUCTION WiMAX or Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access, based on IEEE 802.16 [1], defines the standards for the broadband wireless access (BWA) over a large metropolitan area. The two major extensions of 802.16 are 802.16a that defines the specifications for the fixed BWA and 802.16e for the mobile BWA. For Non-Line of Sight (NLOS) applications, the anticipated spectrum of operation [5] is between 2-6 GHz, which is sub-divided into several groups. The 2.3 2.9 GHz and 3.3 3.7 GHz bands are targeted for licensing, while the upper 5.1 5.9 GHz band is intended for unlicensed purposes. Wireless access for smaller local area network (WLAN) operates at 2.4 2.485 GHz and 4.9 5.9 GHz based on 802.11b/g [2], [3] and 802.11a [4] respectively. An extension of the current WLAN standard is 802.11n that supports greater data rates by employing multiple antennas at the transmitting and receiving end. While the frequency range of operation is same as the earlier versions, the new WLAN systems are intended to support efficient modulations such as 256-QAM that demands greater SNR at the receiver and hence lower noise figure. In the future systems that support these 4G standards, it is advantageous to combine these two technologies into a single system, which can switch between the modes of

RF Front-end is an important part of the system as it provides the necessary gain while introducing minimal noise to meet the required SNR to process the signal in the baseband. A typical RF front-end consists of an LNA, Balun (or Single to differential converter) and mixer. Balun can either be placed before the LNA or after depending up on the design flexibility and involved trade-offs between noise, power and area. In this design, LNA precedes balun for the reasons outlined in the discussion of the design of LNA. A. LNA and Balun The discussion from this point onwards is done by considering LNA and balun as the part of LNA circuitry with two different stages. Hence, wherever LNA is mentioned both LNA and balun stages are intended unless otherwise stated. The primary figures of merit for the LNA are Gain, Noise Figure, S11, linearity. Output matching with 50 Ohms is not necessary for LNA because in the direct-conversion receiver architecture there is no need for image reject filter. The following stage of LNA is mixer whose input impedance can be modeled using a 300 pF differential capacitance at the output of LNA. However, LNA needs to provide 50 Ohm input matching for the 2 - 6 GHz frequency range. One way to achieve the wideband matching is to reduce the Q-factor the input matching network by employing resistive shunt feedback from the output [6]. The disadvantage of shuntresistance method is that the gain is not constant across 2 6 GHz as LNA is operable at only specific range of frequencies. The input matching in this paper is achieved by using a bandpass network at the input [7] as shown in Fig. 1.

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Figure 1. Input Matching Network

The LC tanks are designed such that lower and upper cutoff frequencies as: L = 1 RC 2 = R L1 and U = 1 RC1 . The inductor L2 is the source degeneration resistor that provides the input matching to 50 Ohms by L 2 = (g m C gs ) . The coupling capacitor Cc is used to block the DC and should be large enough so that it does not alter the resonance of the series LC tank. A capacitance CP is added in parallel with the Cgs of the input transistor, which gives additional degree of freedom for the matching network. A series gate inductance Lg may be needed to resonate the whole input network at the center frequency of 4 GHz or the source degenerative inductor itself is sufficient. The architecture for the first stage of LNA used in the design is common-source cascode amplifier with source degeneration. The output resonance circuit may be designed by employing inductors in series with the switches [8], which select the corresponding inductor to resonate at the frequency of interest. One disadvantage with this method is that switches contribute additional noise and have finite ON resistance, which reduces the Q-factor of the output and hence the achievable gain. First stage of the proposed LNA in this paper shown in Fig. 2 uses three isolated output chains for each band, which can be selected by turning ON and OFF the cascode transistor that follows the input transistor and thus eliminating the need for switches at the output. The output signal is selected in the second stage of LNA (or balun), which will be discussed shortly.

3.6 GHz and 5.5 GHz. Since the 5 GHz band is fairly wide, a small resistance in series with the inductor is used to reduce the Q-factor of output resonance circuit. Low-Q will result in reduction of gain combined with the attenuation due to the parasitic capacitance at the input transistor. This issue is resolved in the design of balun and is discussed shortly. Note that the inductors at the output decrease in size with the increase of resonance frequency. As such, these inductors can be laid within each other with largest inductor being the outermost number of turns that will save area. Coupling issues are minimal because only one inductor is active at a given time as the cascode transistor is turned OFF in the other bands. The sizes of the transistors are designed to achieve necessary gain and input matching according g Q to Av = m L , where QL is the output quality factor and CL 2f l C L is the estimated load capacitance from the input of mixer. Proper choice of W/L ratio of the input transistor needs to be selected in order not to disturb the input matching. Tradeoff between the size of the transistor and noise figure also exist due to the dependence of the noise figure of the circuit with the unity gain frequency, which is given by [13] Fmin = 1 + 2.4 . Second stage of the LNA is balun whose purpose is twofold in this paper. Proposed balun converts the single-ended outputs of LNA first stage to differential and provides the different gain across bands so that the overall gain of LNA is uniform. The advantage of using this architecture is that it eliminates the necessity of second over-laid inductors in the first stage of LNA, which saves area and simultaneously smoothing out the unevenness of the gain. Architecture of the second stage LNA is shown in Fig. 3.

Figure 3. LNA Second Stage Active Balun

Figure 2. First Stage of LNA

In the Fig. 2, three inductors at the output are designed to resonate at the center frequency of band of interest, 2.6 GHz,

The second stage consists of three differential pairs that can be selected by turning them ON using the band-select signals that are supplied via resistors. The outputs from the first stage of LNA are fed through the DC blocking capacitors to make the biasing of the input pair dependent only on the DC bias of the source current mirror and the

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band select signals. The output inductors are designed to resonate at the center frequency of 5.5 GHz providing the gains close to 5 dB over 4.9 5.9 GHz and less than 0 dB for the 2.6 GHz and 3.3 GHz bands. Higher gains in the first stage for the lower bands are hence offset by these lower gains of the second stage. The amount of attenuation or gain in each band can be controlled by selecting the appropriate W/Ls of the input pair and the DC bias of the current mirror. In order to achieve respectable gain and phase errors across the differential signals, capacitor is added in parallel with the input of one of the differential pairs [9]. B. Mixer The output of the balun is fed to the mixer which also takes the differential input signal from Local Oscillator (LO). Since the RF signal frequency can range from 2 6 GHz, the mixer needs to be wideband providing relatively uniform gain across all frequencies. One of the most common mixer architectures is based on Gilbert cell [10] in which a pair of differential LO transistors mix with the RF signal provided via a transconductance amplifier. The differential LO transistors can either be of N-type or P-type. The P-type pairs introduce lower 1/f flicker noise due to the lower hole mobility compared to the N-type transistor and hence P-type pairs are used in this design. The RF transconductance transistor generally is of N-type and provides sufficient linearity and gain for most of the applications. One way to efficiently utilize the supplied bias current is to exploit the current re-use [11] where an additional P-type transistor is used to provide twice the gain for the same bias current. The total gm for the transconductor amplifier then would be sum of the gms of the NMOS (gmn) and PMOS transistors (gmp) and the combined gain is given by:
Av = (g mn + g mp ) RL , where RL is the load resistance.

The load resistance is switched to a different value for the higher band to match the gain of 12 dB for the lower 2.6 GHz and 3.6 GHz bands. Higher gain (> 15 dB) in the lower bands can be achieved by switching to the load resistance for the 5.5 GHz band. The proposed circuit for the mixer requires less amount of DC current, and has low flicker noise corner. The circuit is designed to provide fairly uniform gain over a range of LO drive, i.e., from 200 mV to 700 mV. III. SIMULATION RESULTS

This section summarizes the overall performance of the RF Front-end and presents the simulation results. The gain, noise figure, S11 and IIP3s are simulated for all the three bands and are shown in Figure 5, 6, 7 and 8 respectively.

Figure 5. Gain of Front-end

In order to boost the gain of the mixer that higher frequencies closer to 5 GHz band, additional band select transistors [12] are used to increase the gm of the input transconductor. These transistors coupled with the different resistive loads provide the necessary uniform gain across all the bands. The complete schematic of the mixer with all the circuitry discussed above is shown in Fig. 4.

From Fig. 5, it can be observed that the gains for the different bands of operation are almost identical for certain range of LO drive, especially from 300mV to 550 mV where the value of gain is around 32 dB. The two-stage LNA provides a gain of around 20 dB, while mixer contributes 12 dB of gain. The gain and phase errors at the output of the balun are less than 0.5 dB and 5 degrees respectively. Fig. 6 shows the noise figure for the three bands.

Figure 4. Mixer Circuit

Figure 6. Noise Figure

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As shown in Fig. 6, the noise figure is around 2.5 dB, 3.5 dB and 5.9 dB for 2.6 GHz, 3.6 GHz and 5.5 GHz band respectively. The corner frequency for the 1/f flicker noise is between 6 KHz to 8 KHz. The noise figures shown are for double-sideband as the desired signal is present in the image as well for a direct-conversion receiver. S11 is a measure of extent of input matching for the frequency range of operation of LNA 2 6 GHz. Typically, S11 in the range of -10 dB to -15 dB is acceptable. Fig. 7 shows the S11 of the LNA (first and second stages combined) for the different frequency bands of operation.

The performance of the RF Front-end is shown in Table 1.

Table 1. Performance Summary Parameter Front-End Frequency Gain (dB) Noise Figure(dB) S11 (dB) IIP3 (dBm) 1/f Corner Frequency (KHz) Power (mW) Bias Current(mA) 2.6GHz 32 2.5 -25 -16.9 6.42 45 25.3 3.6GHz 32 3.5 -40 -7 7.68 45 25.3 5.5GHz 32 5.9 -13 -7.8 8.55 48 26.25

IV. CONCLUSION In this paper, a tri-band RF front-end for the WiMAX and WLAN applications has been demonstrated. A programmable LNA is advantageous over a wide-band LNA (similar to ultra-wideband applications) as it allows for better performance and relaxed trade-offs. The architecture of the receiver under consideration is the direct-conversion as it has lesser discrete components, which can lead to greater integration and reduced cost especially for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) applications.
Figure 7. S11 Input Matching

REFERENCES
[1] IEEE Standard for Local and Metropolitan Area Networks Part 16: Air Interface for Fixed Broadband Wireless Access Systems, IEEE Std 802.16-2004 (Revision of IEEE Std 802.16-2001). [2] Wireless LAN Medium Access Control (MAC) And Physical Layer (PHY) Specifications: Higher-speed Physical Layer Extension In The 2.4 GHz Band, IEEE Std. 802.11b-1999. [3] Wireless LAN medium access control (MAC) and physical layer (PHY) specifications, IEEE Std 802.11g-2003 (Amendment to IEEE Std 802.11, 1999 Edn. [4] Wireless LAN medium access control (MAC) and physical layer (PHY) specifications amendment 1: high-speed physical layer in the 5 GHz band, IEEE Std. 802.11a-1999. [5] RF Spectrum Utilization in WiMAX, White paper WiMAX spectrum, Fujitsu Microelectronics America, Inc. November 2004. [6] Derek K. Shaeffer, and Thomas H. Lee, A 1.5 V, 1.5 GHz CMOS low noise amplifier, IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits, Vol. 32, No. 5, May 1997. [7] A. Ismail, A. Abidi, A 3 to 10 GHz LNA Using a Wideband LCladder Matching Network, IEEE ISSCC 2004. [8] C. Wang et al., A multi-band multi-standard RF frontend for IEEE 802.16a and IEEE 802.11a/b/g applications, ISCAS 2005, 23-26 May 2005 Page(s):3974 3977. [9] Scott K. Reynolds et al., A Direct-Conversion Receiver IC for WCDMA Mobile Systems, IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits, Vol. 38, No. 9, September 2003. [10] B. Gilbert, A Precise Four-Quadrant Multiplier with sub-nanosecond Response, IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits, vol 3, pp. 365-373, December 1968. [11] Andrew N. Karanicolas, A 2.7 V 900-MHz CMOS LNA and Mixer, IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits, Vol. 31, No. 12, December 1996. [12] Rami Ahola et al., A Single-Chip CMOS Transceiver for 802.11a/b/g Wireless LANs, IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits, Vol. 39, No. 12, December 2004. [13] Thomas H. Lee, The Design of CMOS Radio-Frequency Integrated Circuits, Second Edition, Cambridge University Press, 2004.

The value of S11 is less than -20 dB, -30 dB and -10 dB for the 2.6 GHz, 3.6 GHz and 5.5 GHz bands respectively. Fig. 8 shows the cascaded IIP3 of the RF Front-end.
50 25 O u tp u t P o w er (d B m ) 0 -25 -50 -75 -100 -125 -150 -80 -70 -60 -50 -40 IM for 2.6 GHz IM for 3.6 GHz IM for 5.5 GHz

IIP3
Desired Signal

IIP3 = -16.9 dBm

-30 -20 -10

IIP3 = -7 dBm
0 10

Input Power (dBm)

IIP3 = -7.8 dBm

Figure 8. IIP3 of the RF Front-end

The simulations shown are performed for 2.6, 3.6 GHz and 5.5 GHz band and the IIP3 is estimated to be -16.9 dBm, -7 dBm and -7.8 dBm respectively. It can be observed that the power of the desired signal is identical across the different bands in the IIP3 calculations.

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