A Passive-Mixer-First Acoustic-Filtering Superheterodyne RF Front-End

This article presents an agile passive-mixer-first superheterodyne RF front-end that utilizes a gigahertz acoustic filter as its intermediate-frequency (IF) load—essentially a mixer-first acoustic-filtering RF front-end. The passive mixer frequency-translates a sharp but fixed-frequency acoustic-filtering response to a much higher and mixer-clock-defined tunable frequency while preserves input mat...