Design of a 2nd order filtering voltage-boosting mixer-first receiver for 6G applications

The evolution of wireless technologies toward sixth-generation systems demands improved signal quality, lower latency and higher data rates. This involves more stringent trade-offs between linearity, noise and power consumption, while keeping the system complexity as low as possible. The implementation of current mobile receivers is based on LNA-first architectures, which is becoming the limiting factor for broadband operation and overall system performance. In this thesis, a voltage-boosting-mixer-first architecture is proposed, which overcomes the limitations of the LNA-first architectures, while retaining its intrinsic advantages associated with high front-end gain and low noise. After a short introduction on fundamentals of RF theory, different examples of possible mixers that can be used for the mixer-first topology are briefly reviewed, illustrating the reasons for the choice of the voltage-mode boosting mixer as the starting point. Next, the prior art on voltage-mode boosting mixers is analyzed in more detail . Finally, a modified voltage-boosting-mixer based receiver architecture is introduced that achieves 2nd order filtering, thus improving out-of-band linearity, while retaining the key advantages of low-noise and high front-end gain.