Vol. 35, No. 12 Journal of Semiconductors December 2014
A high linearity downconverter for digital broadcasting system
Li Songting(李松亭), Li Jiancheng(李建成)
, Gu Xiaochen(谷晓忱), Wang Hongyi(王宏义),
and Zhuang Zhaowen(庄钊文)
College of Electronic Science and Engineering, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha 410073, China
Abstract: An integrated downconverter with high linearity for digital broadcasting system receivers is imple-
mented in a 0.13 m CMOS process with an active area of 0.1 mm
2
. The current-mode scheme is adopted to im-
prove linearity performance by avoiding voltage fluctuation. A passive CMOS switching pair is utilized to improve
the even-order linearity of the downconverter. A current amplifier is used to provide low input impedance which
will easily lead to a wide operating bandwidth and high linearity. Moreover, a current-mode Sallen-Key low-pass
filter is adopted for effective rejection of out-of-band interferers and also low input impedance. The digital-assisted
DC offset calibration improves the second-order distortion of the downconverter. This design achieves a maximum
gain of 40 dB and a dynamic range of 10 dB. Measured noise figure is 8.2 dB, an IIP2 of 63 dBm, an IIP3 of 17 dBm
at the minimum gain of 30 dB. The downconverter consumes about 7.7 mA under a supply of 1.2 V.
Key words: current-mode downconverter; CMOS switching pair; DC offset calibration; direct conversion
receiver; linearity; Sallen-Key low-pass filter
DOI: 10.1088/1674-4926/35/12/125010 EEACC: 1270E; 2570F; 6420D
1. Introduction
Digital broadcasting systems such as the digital video
broadcasting-satellite (DVB-S) and advanced broadcasting
system-satellite (ABS-S), are characterized by the fairly large
frequency band to be received (1–2 GHz), and are referred to as
wide-band systems. In contrast to the narrow-band system such
as cellular and cordless communications, the DBS receiver ex-
periences a large number of unwanted channel interferers be-
cause of the many broadcasting channels and satellites. More-
over, the out-of-narrowband signals such as wireless local area
network (WLAN) also generate serious second-order inter-
modulation distortion (IMD2) and third-order inter-modulation
distortion (IMD3). Therefore, stringent linearity requirements
must be achieved in the DBS receiver. A current-mode down-
converter
Œ1; 2
is usually employed to improve the linearity of
the receiver owing to its small voltage swing. As shown in
Fig. 1, the conventional current-mode downconverter gener-
ally consists of a transconductance (G
m
/ stage for voltage-to-
current conversion, a current commutating passive mixer for
frequency down-conversion, and a transimpedance amplifier
(TIA) for current-to-voltage conversion. In addition, in order
to further improve the linearity performance in the presence of
the strong out-of-band interferential signals, large capacitances
are usually placed after the mixer to form a low frequency pole
and suppress the down-converted out-of-band blocker at the
TIA input
Œ35
. However, these capacitances usually consume
a considerable silicon area, especially in the scenario that the
out-of-band interferer is close to the desired RF signal. Further-
more, the gain of the RF front-end is also decreased with the
increasing of the capacitance.
This paper presents an improved current-mode direct-
conversion downconverter to further reduce the dependency on
the voltage fluctuation and acquire higher linearity. The pre-
sented downconverter includes a passive mixer with CMOS
switches topology
Œ6
, which will improve the even-order lin-
earity of the switch pair, a current amplifier (CA) with low in-
put impedance in a large frequency range, and a Sallen-Key
low-pass filter (SK-LPF)
Œ7
with higher out-of-band interfer-
ers suppression, which can improve the out-of-band linearity
of the receiver. Moreover, a digital-assisted DCOC
Œ7; 8
circuit
is also implemented to decrease the IMD2 and cancel the DC
offset. Compared to the previous publication
Œ5; 911
, this pa-
per focuses on the design concept of the downconverter. It de-
scribes in detail why we process signals in the current domain,
why we need a CMOS switch topology, a SK LPF instead of a
signal-pole filter and how we perform DCOC circuits by digi-
tal assistance, as well as how to implement those functions in
circuits.
2. Limitation of conventional passive downcon-
verter
2.1. Input impedance
In a conventional passive downconverter, as shown in
Fig. 1, the G
m
stage generates IMD due to its non-ideal voltage-
to-current conversion; the little current output from the G
m
stage can be expressed in a Taylor series expansion:
i
ds
.v
gs
; v
ds
/ D
1
X
iD1
"
g
m_i
v
i
gs
C g
d_i
v
i
ds
C
1
X
iD1
g
m_i;d_n
v
i
gs
v
n
ds
#
;
(1)
where v
gs
is the input voltage swing, v
ds
is the output voltage
swing, g
m_i
are input transconductance terms, g
d_i
are output
conductance terms, and g
m_i;d_n
are cross-modulation terms. In
* Project supported by the Science and Technology Innovation Project for the Postgraduates of National University of Defense Technology.
† Corresponding author. Email: lijc@nudt.edu.cn
Received 7 May 2014, revised manuscript received 13 July 2014 © 2014 Chinese Institute of Electronics
125010-1