A 4.2dB NF and 39dB 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 µW power.