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A Wide Bandwidth Rectangular Dielectric Resonator Antenna for LTE 4G Handset Front-end
I-Tseng Tang, Simon C. Li, Ding-Bing Lin, C. H. Syu, and Bo-Yuo Chen Graduate Institute of Communication Engineering, National University of Tainan, Taiwan

Abstract A new 2.6 GHz CMOS LTE 4G handset receiver front-end with a wideband rectangular dielectric resonator antenna are proposed. The antenna provides an impedance bandwidth of 95% for VSWR 2.5. A monopole antenna conformed standard (2.05 5.8 GHz) characteristics including return loss and radiation patterns were analyzed and discussed. LTE 4G handset receiver front-end using merged folded cascoded (MFC) scheme demonstrate a 13.7 dB gain, low noise gure of 5.6 dB, and IIP3 at 1.67 dBm with 1.97 mA bias current from a 1.0-V power supply. 1. INTRODUCTION

LTE (Long Term Evolution) is the next generation for mobile wireless communications. Higher date rate of 100 Mbit/s in downlink and 50 Mbit/s in uplink by FDD and TDD in the OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing) platform with simple direct conversion architecture are major advantages of LTE over the current mobile technology. OFDM, a spectrum-sharing method dierent than that of previous generations, provides exible and ecient use of dierent carrier bandwidths along with tolerance to noise and multipath interference. LTE phones will have to be backwards-compatible with GSM and 3G CDMA. networks. Therefore, LTE have more stringent requirement of linearity and noise level than previous mobile network standards. Design of LTE RF front-end in the 2.6 GHz frequency band becomes crucial need of 4G cellular phone. Multiple-Input, Multiple-Output (MIMO) antenna designs can increase the bit-rate using spatial multiplexing, which is basically gluing several antennas together. Recently, the dielectric resonator antenna has been extensively studied owing to its numerous advantages such as high radiation eciency, low weight, and miniature size. The shapes of DRAs are various and dierent, such as hemispherical, cylindrical and rectangular. DRAs can be excited by dierent feeding method, such as coaxial feed, microstrip line and co-planar lines. The DRAs can be completed low prole due to high dielectric permittivity of the materials. In this paper, we propose a new 2.6 GHz CMOS LTE 4G handset receiver front-end with a wideband rectangular dielectric resonator antenna.
2. LTE 4G FRONT-END DESIGN 2.1. Antenna Design

A wideband rectangular dielectric resonator antenna suitable for 2.6 GHz CMOS LTE 4G handset receiver front-end is shown in Fig. 1. Fig. 1 shows the geometry and conguration of the proposed antenna. The proposed antenna is to fabricate on a low-cast FR-4 substrate with dielectric constant r = 4.4, loss tan = 0.02, and thickness h = 0.8 mm. A rectangular dielectric resonator is inserted a substrate with a size of 43 30 mm2 . The dimension of dielectric resonator is 31 21 5.08 mm3 with a permittivity of r = 9.8. The dielectric resonator antenna is excited by a 50 microstrip feed line. In order to an impedance matching, the monopole is connected to the feed connector to achieve enhanced input impedance matching over the preferred bandwidth. Besides, setting a stub beside the dielectric resonator can be improved the impedance matching. Just like the method of step impedance matching. Fig. 2 shows the eects of the dielectric resonator with and without side patch.
2.2. LTE 4G Front-end Design

A 2.6 GHz CMOS LTE receiver front-end using merged folded cascoded (MFC) circuit scheme [3] is proposed as shown in Fig. 3. In order to achieve low power consumption, the dc current path from the power supply to the LNA is removed. Instead, a mixer is stacked above the LNA and a large bypass capacitor between the LNA and the mixer is inserted, and hence a reliable ac ground is ensured. In this merged scheme, the LNA operates by only reusing the dc bias current of the mixer without any additional power consumption. However, if a LNA merged with a single-balanced mixer vertically there may not be much voltage headroom since many transistors would be stacked

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5 4.5 w ith side w ithout side

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4 3.5

9.74 6.3 5.4

3 2.5 2 1.5 1 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

0.74 11.7 1.5

43 r = 4.4

Frequency(GHz)

Figure 1: Geometry and conguration of the proposed antenna.

Figure 2: Eects of the dielectric resonator with and without side stub.

Figure 3: Merged folded-cascoded (MFC) LTE 4G handset front-end.

between VDD to ground. To prevent RF performance degradation caused by the absence of the conventional LNA stage, both a LNA and a mixer are merged in the proposed front-end. A merged folded-cascoded mixer instead of a single-balanced mixer in the MFC LTE 4G handset front-end is shown in Fig. 3. In addition, an inverter-type transconductance stage instead of a single nMOS transistor is utilized to enhance the gain of the mixer. Therefore, a better RF performance compared to those of a cascaded LNA and mixer with this merge of the LNA and mixer with the inverter-type transconductance stage is achieved. This low power scheme consumes no more than the amount of power used in the merged LNA and mixer, as it reuses the dc bias current. This merged LNA and mixer provide a forward gain of 15.3 dB and a noise gure of 5.5 dB under a 0.61 mW dc power shown in Fig. 4. Noise gure of the proposed front-end can be substantially improved by the large gain of merged LNA. As merged LNA suciently suppresses white and icker noises modulated by the mixer. Besides, a folded-cascode mixer is inherently less aected by icker noise. In direct-conversion receivers, icker noise is the dominant noise source since the down-converted RF signal at the mixer output is noticeably corrupted by icker noise. Consequently it becomes a demanding task to reduce icker noise for a low-power mixer design. In a fully dierential mixer, the output signal is only aected by icker noise generated in the switching stage. The noise gures of mixer switching stage at various intermediate frequencies are plotted in Fig. 5. The conversion gain and IIP3 of the

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Figure 4: Voltage gain and noise gure of merged LNA and mixer.

Figure 5: Noise gure to IF in the mixer switching stage.

Figure 6: Conversion gain of the mixer switching stage.

Figure 7: IIP3 of the mixer switching stage.

Figure 8: S21 and noise gure of MFC LTE 4G handset front-end.

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PIERS Proceedings, Suzhou, China, September 1216, 2011 Table 1: Summary of MFC receiver front-end for LTE 4G handset. LTE Front-End Characteristics Supply Forward Gain Conversion Gain Pin1 dB IIP3 Isolation (RF Port) Isolation (LO Port) Isolation (IF Port) Noise Figure Power Consumption This work 2.6 GHz unit 1 V 13.7 dB 5.0 dB 24.5 dBm 1.67 dBm 27.2 dB 26.4 dB 13.0 dB 5.6 dB 1.97 mW

Table 2: Major performance comparisons with previous works. RF front-end Performance Frequency [GHz] Supply Voltage [V] Voltage Gain [dB] IIP3 [dBm] Noise Figure [dB] Power Consumption [mW] [4] 2.44 1.8 21.4 18 13.9 6.4 [5] 0.9 1.8 15 1.5 4 4.32 [6] 0.9 1.8 10 5 3.6 3.6 This work 2.6 1 13.7 1.67 5.6 1.97

mixer switching stage is 5 dB and 8.1 dBm as indicated in Figs. 6 and 7, taking only 1.3 mA from a 1.0-V power supply. In Fig. 8, MFC receiver front-end achieves a forward gain S21 of 13.7 dB and a noise gure of 5.6 dB at 100 MHz with 1.97 mA bias current from a 1-V power supply. In order to reduce power consumption, the dc current path from the power supply to the LNA is replaced by a stacked mixer transconductance stage. In this scheme, the LNA operates by only reusing the dc bias current of the stacked mixer. Voltage gain and noise gure of MFC front-end are shown in Fig. 4. The performances of merged folded-cascoded (MFC) front-end for 4G LTE handset are summarized in Table 1. Table 2 lists major performance comparisons with previous works.
3. CONCLUSION

A 2.6-GHz fully integrated CMOS receiver front-end using merged folded-cascoded circuit scheme and a wideband rectangular dielectric resonator antenna are proposed and demonstrated. The antenna provides an impedance bandwidth of 95% for VSWR 2.5. A monopole antenna conformed standard (2.05 5.8 GHz) characteristics. The proposed front-end improves noise gure and conversion gain by employing a vertically merged LNA and folded-cascoded mixer. The fully integrated 2.4-GHz receiver front-end is fabricated using 0.18 m CMOS technology, and a voltage gain of 13.7 dB with a noise gure of 5.6 dB is achieved with 1.97 mW power consumption.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT

Authors would appreciate the nancial support from National Science Council of Taiwan, NSC 99-2221-E-024-019.
REFERENCES

1. Sulaiman, M. I. and S. K. Khamas, A singly fed rectangular dielectric resonator antenna with a wideband circular polarization, IEEE Antennas and Wireless Propagation Letters, Vol. 9, 2010.

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2. Liang, X.-L. and T. A. Denidni, Cross-T-shaped dielectric resonator antenna for wideband applications, Electronics Letters, Vol. 44, No. 20, 2008. 3. Jarvinen, J. A. M., et al., 2.4-GHz receiver for sensor applications, IEEE J. Solid-State Circuits, Vol. 40, No. 7, 14261433, Jul. 2005. 4. Semiconductor, T., TQ9203-low current RFIC down converter, Wireless Communication Products, 1995. 5. Oh, N. J., S. G. Lee, and J. H. Ko, A CMOS 868/915 MHz direct conversion ZigBee single-chip radio, IEEE Commun. Mag., Vol. 43, No. 12, 100109, Dec. 2005. 6. Kwon, I., A single-chip CMOS transceiver for UHF mobile RFIC reader, IEEE J. Solid-State Circuits, Vol. 43, No. 3, 729738, Mar. 2008.