IEEE MICROWAVE AND WIRELESS COMPONENTS LETTERS, VOL. 26, NO.

1, JANUARY 2016 73

A 370 CMOS MedRadio Receiver Front-End

With Inverter-Based Complementary
Switching Mixer
Chihoon Choi, Student Member, IEEE, Kuduck Kwon, Member, IEEE, and Ilku Nam, Senior Member, IEEE

Abstract—A low-power CMOS RF receiver front-end is

proposed for medical device radiocommunications service
(MedRadio) applications. The proposed MedRadio receiver
front-end design incorporates an AC-coupled current reuse
inverter in order to reduce power consumption and increase
transconductance . The proposed RF front-end comprises
a current-reuse low noise amplifier with ac coupling inverter
topology and an inverter-based single-balanced mixer with com-
plementary switching. The proposed RF front-end is implemented
in a 0.18 CMOS process and draws 370 from a 1 V supply
voltage. It shows a gain of more than 29 dB, NF of less than 5.2 dB, Fig. 1. Block diagram of the presented MedRadio receiver front-end.
and IIP3 of more than 19.5 dBm for all MedRadio bands.
Index Terms—CMOS, front-end, low-power, medical, RF.
related to gain, NF, and linearity). In addition, new devices are
required to have MedRadio front-ends that support MedRadio
I. INTRODUCTION bands in the range of 401–457 MHz.
In this letter, a low-power low-voltage CMOS RF receiver

M EDICAL device radiocommunications service

(MedRadio), which is a wireless communication regu-
lation dedicated for biomedical telemetry, has drawn attention
due to the need for cost effective medical services at homes
and hospitals. This need is growing with the rising number of
the elderly, and a rise in chronic disease. In 2009, MedRadio
band from 401 to 406 MHz was released by the US Federal
Communications Commission (FCC) [1]. In 2011, FCC as-
signed a medical micropower networks (MMNs) band, which
included 413–419 MHz, 426–432 MHz, 438–444 MHz, and
451–457 MHz, to the MedRadio band, since the demand of
higher data transfer has increased.
MedRadio RF transceivers for implantable and wearable
medical monitoring devices, in wireless body area networks,
consume most of the power used for this band. Therefore,
it is important to reduce current consumption and to lower
supply voltage in order to minimize the power consumption of
biomedical wireless transceivers. Moreover, a simpler archi-
tecture is preferred, without RF performance degradation (e.g.,
Manuscript received August 06, 2015; revised October 07, 2015; accepted
October 21, 2015. Date of publication December 22, 2015; date of current ver-
sion January 06, 2016. This work was supported by the Basic Science Research
Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by
the Ministry of Education (NRF-2013R1A1A2011732). The CAD tool was sup-
ported by IDEC.
C. Choi and I. Nam are with the Department of Electrical Engineering and
PNU-LG Smart Control Center, Pusan National University, Busan 609-735,
Korea (e-mail: nik@pusan.ac.kr).
K. Kwon is with the Department of Electronics Engineering, Kangwon Na-
tional University, Chuncheon, Gangwon-do 200-701, Korea.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LMWC.2015.2505614
front-end suitable for MedRadio applications is proposed. It
supports the entire MedRadio bands (from 401 to 457 MHz).
The proposed RF receiver front-end, adopting inverter-based
topology and complementary switching technique, is described
in detail and the measured results are herein reported.
II. RF FRONT-END WITH COMPLEMENTARY SWITCHING
Fig. 1 shows the block diagram of the proposed MedRadio RF
receiver front-end. It includes a LNA, a quadrature down-con-
version mixer, inverter-type LO buffers, and a two-stage passive
polyphase filter for quadrature LO signal generation from an ex-
ternal LO signal source.
As shown in Fig. 2, the LNA adopts the topology of AC-cou-
pled current reuse inverter amplifier composed of NMOS
and PMOS . Compared with conventional common source
amplifiers of the same current consumption, the current reuse
LNA has double transconductance [2]. The biasing for
and are separated to support low supply voltage (1-V), and
to provide robustness against variations in process, voltage, and
temperature (PVT). The determines a dc operating bias of
high impedance output drain node of and .
A single-balanced mixer structure is employed in an
down-conversion mixer due to the low power constraint. The
single-balanced down-conversion mixer is similar to the
AC-coupled current reuse LNA mentioned above, except for
the inclusion of complementary switching transistors
parallel with feedback load resistances .
Fig. 3(a) shows the schematic of unbalanced version of the pro-
posed mixer and its waveforms in operation. Complementary

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74 IEEE MICROWAVE AND WIRELESS COMPONENTS LETTERS, VOL. 26, NO. 1, JANUARY 2016

TABLE I
COMPARISON OF MIXER STRUCTURES

When the LO signal turns on the switch transistors and

, the attenuated RF signal appears at drain node X. From
Fig. 2. Simplified schematic of the proposed MedRadio receiver front-end.
Fig. 3(c), the voltage gain can be expressed as
(For simplicity, ac coupling capacitors and dc bias resistors for LO are omitted).

(2)
where and are the on resistance of and
, respectively. The proposed mixer has effective LO
switching from 1 to , as shown in Fig. 3(d). Therefore,
by (1) and (2), the conversion gain of the proposed
down-conversion mixer can be approximated by

(3)

As shown in (3), the conversion gain of the proposed mixer

increases by the factor compared to the conventional
single-balanced passive mixer which has a transconductor
stage in front of it. The proposed mixer has the same conversion
gain as the conversion gain of the passive mixer in the condition
of the (i.e. ). Therefore, the
proposed mixer does not require so small on-resistance of the
switch as the passive mixer does. Compared with the passive
mixer, the proposed mixer can work with smaller switch size
and/or less LO swing and so the power consumption of the LO
buffers decreases.
A comparison of the proposed inverter-based complementary
switching mixer with conventional mixer structures is shown
Fig. 3. (a) Schematic of the unbalanced version of the proposed mixer and in Table I. The proposed mixer obtains high conversion gain
its waveforms, (b) small-signal equivalent circuit when LO switches are off,
(c) small-signal equivalent circuit when LO switches are on, (d) effective LO
with low power consumption and good low-frequency noise
switching operation. (For simplicity, and are omitted). performance. Since no dc current flows in the switching tran-
sistors of the proposed inverter-based com-
switches driven by and can suppress LO leakage plementary switching mixer in Fig. 2, it is expected to have good
signal at the IF port of node X. low-frequency noise performance. Compared with conventional
Assuming an LO signal as a large switching signal, comple- single balanced Gilbert mixers, the proposed mixer eliminates
mentary switching transistors composed of NMOS and one stack of switching transistors, which makes it suitable for a
PMOS are turned on and off by the LO signal. When the low-voltage power supply. Because the proposed mixer can be
LO signal turns off the switch transistors and , an driven by smaller LO swing than the LO swing voltage required
amplified RF signal appears at the drain node X. Fig. 3(b) shows in the passive mixer, the power consumption of the LO buffer
the small signal equivalent circuit of the unbalanced version of can be reduced.
the proposed mixer when the LO switching transistors are off.
In this case, the voltage gain can be expressed as III. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
The proposed RF receiver front-end was implemented in a
(1) 0.18 CMOS process. Fig. 4 shows a photograph of the pro-
posed RF front-end. The die size is 1 mm 0.6 mm, excluding
where is the parallel output resistance of and . ESD protection circuits and PADs. Total current consumption,
CHOI et al.: A 370 CMOS MEDRADIO RECEIVER FRONT-END WITH INVERTER-BASED COMPLEMENTARY SWITCHING MIXER 75

TABLE II
SUMMARY AND COMPARISON OF PERFORMANCE

Fig. 4. Chip photograph of the fabricated RF front-end circuits.

,
,

Table II summarizes the measured results of the proposed

MedRadio receiver front-end and compares the performance of
the proposed MedRadio receiver front-end with that of other
published low-power RF front-ends [4]–[6]. Compared with
others, the proposed MedRadio front-end has a better figure of
merit (FOM) [7].

IV. CONCLUSION
An ultra-low-power 401–457 MHz CMOS RF front-end
suitable for MedRadio applications is presented. The pro-
posed MedRadio receiver front-end design incorporates an
AC-coupled current-reuse inverter in order to reduce the power
consumption and increase transconductance . The proposed
RF front-end comprises a current-reuse low noise amplifier
with AC-coupling inverter topology, and an inverter-based
single-balanced mixer with complementary switching. This
front-end could be utilized in an ultra-low-power MedRadio
transceiver, which could be implemented with ultra-low power
consumption, small size and low cost for successful implanta-
Fig. 5. (a) Measured conversion gain at IF frequency of 0.75 MHz, measured
IIP3 and S11 versus operating frequencies, (b) measured DSB NF at RF fre-
tion into bodies.
quency of 433 MHz.
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