CMOS RF front-end design for terrestrial and mobile digital television systems

摘要

With the increasing demand for high quality TV service, digital television (DTV) isreplacing the conventional analog television. DTV tuner is one of the most critical blocksof the DTV receiver system; it down-converts the desired DTV RF channel to baseband ora low intermediate frequency with enough quality. This research is mainly focused on theanalysis and realization of low-cost low-power front-ends for ATSC terrestrial DTV andDVB-H mobile DTV tuner systems.For the design of the ATSC terrestrial tuner, a novel double quadrature tuner architecture,which can not only minimize the tuner power consumption but also achieve the fullyintegration, has been proposed. A double quadrature down-converter has been designed andfabricated with TSMC 0.35????m CMOS technology; the measurement results verified theproposed concepts.For the mobile DTV tuner, a zero-IF architecture is used and it can achieve the DVB-Hspecifications with less than 200mW power consumption. In the implementation of themobile DVB-H tuner, a novel RF variable gain amplifier (RFVGA) and a low flicker noise current-mode passive mixer have been proposed. The proposed RFVGA achieves highdynamic range and robust input impedance matching performance, which is the maindesign challenge for the traditional implementations. The current-mode passive mixerachieves high-gain, low noise (especially low flicker noise) and high-linearity (over 10dBmIIP3) with low power supplies; it is believed that this is a promising topology for lowvoltage high dynamic range mixer applications. The RFVGA has been fabricated in TSMC0.18????m CMOS technology and the measurement results agree well with the theoreticalones.