A Reflectionless Receiver with Absorptive if Amplifier and Dual-Path Noise-Canceling LNA

Abstract

This article presents a 22.6-39.2-GHz reflectionless receiver (RX) capable of reducing the in-band intermodulation and high-order mixing products. Such RX consists of an absorptive IF amplifier, a double-balance passive mixer, and a dual-path noise-canceling low noise amplifier (LNA). The absorptive IF amplifier is utilized to suppress the out-of-band signal reflected back to mixer, which can reduce the intermodulation and high-order mixing products caused by the remixing of the out-of-band signals. Meanwhile, the dual-path noise-canceling LNA is used for achieving low noise figure (NF) in a wide frequency range. To verify the aforementioned principle, a reflectionless RX is implemented and fabricated using a conventional 28-nm CMOS technology. The measurement shows the minimum NF of 3.6 dB and the peak input third-order intercept point (IIP3) of -11.7 dBm. Besides, the proposed RX can support multi-Gb/s, 256-quadratic amplitude modulation (QAM)/1024-QAM modulation signals.