Low-power high-Q NEMS receiver architecture

A new low-power RF receiver architecture that facilitates use of on-chip high-Q Nano-Electro-Mechanical (NEM) resonators for channel selection at RF is presented. Integration of high-Q RF filters in future low-power receivers is inevitable. In this paper the idea of using high-Q filters is investigated with two approaches. One is determining the requirements of high-Q filters in a narrow-band RF receiver. Two is studying the effect of these filters on the receiver in terms of reducing the power consumption of the blocks such as LNA, Mixer and VCO. The nonlinearity and power consumption of low-IF receiver with and without RF NEMS filters is analyzed. The target application is for the GSM900 MHz, and the high-Q NEMS filters are used as the front-end channel selectivity filters with Q~3000 at 900 MHZ for selecting channels with bandwidth of 200 KHz. This will attenuate interferes and blockers entering the desired signal channel in the receiver resulting in lowering the required dynamic range, linearity, IIP2 and IIP3, and therefore the power consumption of the receiver. The objective of this paper is to create a link between the research on high-Q RF filters and the research on the low-power RF circuit design. The discussion provides a measure about benefits of employing high-Q NEMS filters at RF.