A 29-mW 26.88-GHz Non-Uniform Sub-Sampling Receiver Front-End Enabling Spectral Alias Spreading

This paper introduces a non-uniform sub-sampling (NUSS) technique to relax the analog anti-aliasing filter design for mm-Wave receiver applications. By applying pre-designed periodic perturbation to the sub-sampling time instants, the unwanted spectral aliases, i.e., the integer multiples of the sampling frequency other than the carrier frequency, are spread out; hence undesired blocker aliasing at specific bands is significantly reduced. The NUSS technique effectively creates frequency notches during the sampling process that can be reconfigured simply by changing the NU perturbation sequence. A proof-of-concept NUSS receiver front-end is implemented in 28nm CMOS with 26.88GHz carrier frequency. Through spectral alias spreading, NUSS technique achieves 33dB alias rejection with 29mW power dissipation, which effectively creates notch filtering during sampling. The measured EVM is -25dB using a 200MHz 64QAM modulated signal in the presence of a 0dBc blocker.