A high sensitivity and wide dynamic range zero-IF RF receiver for cognitive radio application

This paper presents an RF receiver of zero-Intermediate Frequency (IF) architecture for Cognitive Radio (CR) communication systems. Zero-IF architecture reduce the image reject filter and IF filter, so it is excellent in low cost, compact volume, and low power dissipation. The receiver employs three digital attenuator and a high gain, high linearity low noise amplifier to achieve wide dynamic range of 70 dB and high receiving sensitivity of −81 dBm. A fully balanced I/Q demodulator and a differential Local Oscillator (LO) chips are used to minimize the negative effects caused by second-order distortion and LO leakage. In order to select an 8 MHz-channel from 14 continuous ones located in UHF band (694–806 MHz) accurately, approach of channel selectivity circuits is proposed. The RF receiver has been designed, fabricated, and test. The measured result shows that the noise figure is 3.4 dB, and the error vector magnitude is 7.5% when the input power is −81 dBm.