A 266µW Bluetooth Low-Energy (BLE) Receiver Featuring an N-Path Passive Balun-LNA and a Pipeline Down-Mixing BB-Extraction Scheme Achieving 77dB SFDR and −3dBm OOB-B_−1dB

Ultra-low-power short-range radios are the cornerstone of building a world with the Internet-of-Everything connectivity. To secure a high sensitivity at a sub-mW power budget, state-of-the-art Bluetooth Low-Energy (BLE) receivers [1]–[4] can hardly prevent the use of an active RF front-end with at least one transconductance gain (g m ). Specifically, although the sub-0.5V LNA [1], [2] and current-reuse LNA-Mixer-VCO cell [3] succeed in power savings, the squeezed voltage headroom tightens the tradeoff between the noise figure (NF) and linearity. The NF and out-of-band (OOB) IIP 3 together govern the spurious-free dynamic range (SFDR) of a receiver, demonstrating its capability to uphold a minimum signal-to-noise ratio (SNR min ) for the demodulator in the presence of blockers.