Design and Analyses of Direct Conversion RF Receiver for WLAN System based on IEEE 802.11a Standard

Abstract

In wireless local area network (WLAN) system, the design of a radio frequency (RF) front-end system is very important in order to meet the system performance specification. Therefore, this paper discusses direct conversion RF receiver architecture, budget and its performance for WLAN system based on IEEE 802.11a standard. Direct conversion RF receiver has been designed with proper selection of receiver subcomponents such as low noise amplifier (LNA), RF amplifier, power divider and filters that available in the market. The selected architecture of the receiver has been further analyzed for system budget and performance such as gain, third-order intercept point (IP3), noise figure (NF), sensitivity and dynamic range. As results, the receiver has 23.50 dB gain, -25 dBm third-order input intercept point (IIP3), -74 dBm sensitivity at 54 Mbps with dynamic range of 65 dB and has met IEEE 802.11a standard.