Wide Dynamic Range RF Front-End Circuits for DVB-H Mobile TV Application

Television (TV) reception is one of the latest features to be added to cell phones and other mobile devices. In 2005, South Korea became the first country in the world to offer mobile TV reception. Japan and several European countries soon followed, and the United States and Canada are not far behind. The goal of this research is exploration, design, implementation, and demonstration of a wide dynamic range, low power, front-end architecture for one of the most popular mobile TV standards, DVB-H (Digital Video Broadcasting-Handhled).;Several steps were taken in this work to demonstrate the feasibility of designing such a front-end architecture using relatively low cost nano-scale CMOS technologies. A complete system analysis to extract the target specifications of the front-end circuits designed in this thesis was created and a candidate receiver architecture capable of meeting the DVB-H mobile TV standard requirements was chosen. New noise and distortion cancelling techniques were proposed to improve the performance of the current wideband low noise amplifiers (LNAs). Furthermore, a mechanism to implement a variable gain control function in the designed LNA to boost the linearity of the DVB-H receiver was introduced. The impact of using passive attenuators to control the RF (radio frequency) gain on a receiver's dynamic range was analyzed. Lastly, the challenges associated with using 65 nanometer CMOS technology were investigated.;To verify the aforementioned concepts, three test chips consisting of a digitally controlled variable gain LNA, a digitally programmed RF passive attenuator, and a complete DVB-H front-end architecture with automatic gain control function were designed and implemented in 65 nm CMOS technology. Experimental results show that the proposed circuits meet the specifications required by the DVB-H mobile TV standard and the designed LNA achieved the lowest noise figure published for low cost wideband CMOS LNAs prior to this work. The robustness of the proposed solution against temperature variation (-40°C to +100°C) as well as power supply variation were also verified in the lab.