A broadband RF 65nm CMOS front-end for cable TV reception

A novel broadband RF front-end in 65nm CMOS technology is presented. The front-end serves to precondition the incoming RFspectrum for further processing in a cable TV receiver architecture where RF channel selection and down conversion are done in digitaldomain. The analog front-end consists of a broadband highly linear low-noise amplifier followed by a variable gain RF amplifier. An original broadband circuit topology for the amplifiers is adopted.The fabricated front-end exhibits a bandwidth of 50–1050 MHz, a variable gain, which spans from 12 to 37 dB with a 0.2 dB step, anOIP3 of 28.4 dBm (77.5 dBmV), an OIP2 of 65dBm (114 dBmV), and a noise figure of 5.8 dB, dissipating 125mW at 1.2V supply, and a core silicon area of 0.4mm2.