This paper presents a single-chip RF tuner/OFDM demodulator for a mobile digital TV application called “1-segment broadcasting.” To achieve required performances for the single-chip receiver, a tunable technique for a low-noise amplifier (LNA) and spurious suppression techniques are proposed in this paper. Firstly, to receive all channels from 470 MHz to 770 MHz and to relax distortion characteristics of following circuit blocks such as an RF variable-gain amplifier and a mixer, a tunable technique for the LNA is proposed. Then, to improve the sensitivity, spurious signal suppression techniques are also proposed. The single-chip receiver using the proposed techniques is fabricated in 90 nm CMOS technology and total die size is 3.26 mm 3.26 mm. Using the tunable LNA and suppressing undesired spurious signals, the sensitivities of less than -98.6 dBm are achieved for all the channels.

A fully-integrated system-on-chip (SoC) for Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) with 3.2mA RX and 3.5mA TX current consumption is presented. To achieve both low current consumption and high performance, the SoC employs a sliding-IF architecture with high tolerance against out-of-band-blocking signals, a power management unit with improved efficiency, and techniques to reduce current in core circuits. The SoC achieves RX sensitivity of -93dBm and maximum output power of 0dBm. The SoC is in compliance with version 4.2 of the Bluetooth specifications and with the radio regulations of the FCC, ETSI, and ARIB. The SoC achieves the minimum level of current consumption for both RX and TX modes in the published product-level SoCs.

A novel spur cancelled clock generator (SCCG) capable of recovering RX sensitivity degradations caused by digital clocks in wireless SoCs is presented. Clock spurs that degrade RX sensitivities are canceled by applying the SCCG to digital circuits or ADCs. The SCCG is integrated into a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) SoC fabricated in a 65 nm CMOS process. A measured clock spur reduction of 34 dB and an RX sensitivity recovery of 5 dB are achieved by the proposed SCCG. The power consumption and occupied area of the SCCG is only 18 µW and 40 μm × 120 μm, respectively.