Abstract
Since 1997, when the new standard for wireless data communication emerged, it has been an explosive demand for wireless enabled products. Over time more and more devices get built-in wireless capabilities in connecting to internet or other devices. As well the amount of data to be transferred increase dramatically. This explosive development of wireless communication and its applications has created high demand for portable wireless devices that are smaller, lighter, and cheaper and of higher performance that ever. To be able to achieve those requirements new system architectures and circuit topologies need to be utilized. One of the factors that have been a driving force for new system architectures and circuit topologies has been development of integrated circuits (IC). Especially the development of CMOS (Complementary Metal Oxide Silicon), deep sub-micron technologies made possible higher level of integration and higher operating frequencies, resulting in improvements of performance, power consumption and cost. Higher frequency limits and improved performance of IC technologies also made it possible to transfer some the signal processing that normally has been done in the analog domain to the digital domain.
In this thesis a front-end for a homodyne receiver suitable for full integration in CMOS technology is presented. The front-end is suitable to operate under both IEEE802.11a and HiperLAN/2 standards operating in the 5-GHz band. The front-end consists of a LNA (Low Noise Amplifier) and two down-conversion mixers and has been designed and simulated in the CMOS 90nm process from STMicroelectronics.