A 1.2V, 2.7mA receiver front-end for bluetooth low energy applications

This paper presents a fully integrated bluetooth low energy (BTLE) receiver front-end implemented in 0.13 um CMOS including the low noise amplifier (LNA), mixer and a variable bandwidth complex bandpass filter. The measured current consumption of the complete front-end is only 2.7 mA at 1.2 V. The designed front-end provides a voltage gain of 40 dB, a noise figure of 11 dB and a IIP3 of -21.2 dBm. The receiver front-end supports also the standard mode of bluetooth (BT) which can be easily achieved by adjusting the bandwidth of the baseband filter. Moreover, circuit techniques have been implemented in the RF front-end to improve the overall production yield and minimize production cost.