DOI: 10.1109/TMTT.2026.3693131   IEEEXplore: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/11534922

A reflectionless down converter with precise gain control and short settling time in 40 nm bulk CMOS technology.

6 – 16 GHz

The digital-coarse feed-forward automatic gain control (DCF-AGC) incorporates three parallel-switching AGC (PS-AGC) modules for coarse gain control and one feed-forward AGC (FF-AGC) for precise gain control accuracy over a wide control range with a short settling time for wideband signals. An absorptive IF buffer mitigates in-band intermodulation (IM) interference for wideband gain flatness and reduces linearity error of the detector to enhance the precision of AGC.

5G-Advanced/6G wireless and satellite communication (SATCOM) applications.

40.5 dB (−9.5∼31 dB) dB-linear gain range with less than ±0.25 dB gain error, 11.4 dB noise figure (NF), and an IIP3 of 12.8 dBm with a baseband bandwidth of 3 GHz; 42.4∼75.9 ns settling time. 3 Gb/s 64-QAM modulation and 8-channel 4.8 Gb/s 64-QAM carrier aggregation (CA) modulation. 57.8 mW power consumption for the entire downconverter, including 19.1 mW AGC power consumption. The chip areas of the downconverter and AGC are 0.223 and 0.025 mm2, respectively.