A WLAN and bluetooth combo transceiver with integrated WLAN power amplifier, transmit-receive switch and WLAN/bluetooth shared low noise amplifier

A front-end circuit of a System-on-a-Chip (SoC) containing an IEEE 802.11b/g/n wireless LAN (WLAN) and a Bluetooth transceiver is presented. This SoC integrates a WLAN power amplifier (PA), a transmit-receive switch (T/R switch), a process and temperature insensitive power detector, and a low-noise amplifier (LNA) that is shared between WLAN and Bluetooth. The class AB power amplifier has a maximum saturated output power of +29dBm, while still meeting -28dB EVM for QAM64 modulation at an output power of +21dBm. The shared low-noise amplifier has a noise figure of 3.3dB. The presented solution significantly reduces the overall Bill-of-Materials (BOM) for the combo WLAN and Bluetooth transceivers.