Design and measurements of a RF front-end for Bi-band simultaneous reception

In this paper, we explore spectrum field band simultaneous receivers, with a special emphasis on only one aspect of these systems – the radio front-end. We propose, to validate in the lab, a receiver scheme for the simultaneous down-conversion of two signals in different bands. Obviously, the dedicated scheme is intended for practical use in an integrated circuit. In this work, the chosen receiver is implemented with discrete components. A test set is evaluated and compared to simulations; it contains mostly standard lab equipment, processing signals, according to the receiver scheme; this receiver presents merits and it is worth demonstrating in an integrated circuit.In order to give credit to the use of this type of receiver, the EDA model and results have to be validated by measurement. Therefore, based on the receiver architecture dedicated to an 802.11/UMTS simultaneous dual-channel processing, we design and fabricate a prototype. Firstly, we measure the intrinsic metrics of this prototype in terms of noise figure, gain, linearity, phase and gain mismatch between the two branches of the quadrature mounted mixers. In the present work, we demonstrate that, for instance, as NF and IIP3 change with the RF front-end gain with the improvement of the RF front-end performance, the linearity and the noise requirements are well handled. Afterwards, these metrics are injected in the EDA receiver model and simulations are done in order to evaluate the BER evolution.