Analysis and design of packaged and ESD protected BiCMOS RF front‐end for a UHF receiver

The design of packaged and ESD protected RF front‐end circuits for UHF receiver working at ISM band is presented. By extensively evaluating the effects of the package and ESD parasitics on the LNA input impedance, transconductance, and noise figure, some useful guidelines on the design of inductively degenerated common emitter LNA with package and ESD protection are provided. In addition, by taking advantage of both the bipolar and MOSFET devices, a BiFET mixer with low noise and high linearity is also described in this article. With the careful consideration of the tradeoffs among noise figure, linearity, power gain, and power consumption, the front‐end is implemented in a generic low‐cost 0.8‐μm BiCMOS technology. The on‐board measurement of the packaged RF front‐end circuits demonstrates a 20.3‐dB power gain, 2.6‐dB DSB noise figure, and ?9.5‐dBm input referred third intercept point while consuming about 3.9‐mA current. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J RF and Microwave CAE, 2007.