The fundamental elements MOS switch, capacitor and inductor (transformer) are revitalized for their potentials to passive-ize the critical RF and analog functions of the wireless radios, aiming to alleviate the obvious tradeoff between the noise, linearity and power consumption. Imagine a low-noise amplifier (LNA) using no transconductance (gm) can be highly linear, while the voltage gain, input-impedance matching and noise figure (NF) are the metrics to innovate. We demonstrate how a Bluetooth LE receiver using no gm can achieve high linearity, and high RF-to-baseband gain (>30dB) to suppress the noise effect of the subsequent circuitry, yielding an outstanding SFDR of 77dB at a sub-300µW power budget. These examples pace the way to build a greener world of energy-autonomous wireless radios for the Internet-of-Everything (IoE) era.

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