Reconfigurable RF Circuits

Abstract

The diverse range of wireless applications necessitates communication systems with more bandwidth and flexibility. It is necessary to design a flexible radio frequency front end for handling a wide range of carrier frequencies. Therefore, an effort has been made in this thesis to increase the flexibility of RF front end circuits like LNA, Oscillator, Power amplifier and filter. The advantage in reconfiguring the RF circuits is that the same hardware platform can be used for different frequencies. The reconfigurable filter greatly reduces the size of the circuit by suing the same set of inductors and capacitors. Also, the switched matrix circuit used for tuning the oscillator enhances the flexibility of the oscillator without much degradation of phase noise. The higher the order of reconfigurability, the higher the noise figure of the low noise amplifier. For the power amplifier, the power added efficiency decreses slightly when it is reconfigured.