Hi All,

I have been assigned the task of designing a receiver frontend IC to use in a remote control unit.

The major challenges from what I see are:

1) Very large interferers in the low- (incandescent lamps) and high-frequency range (fluorescent lamps), which unfortunately are either in the signal band or very close to it.

2) Fairly wide dynamic range requirement, say > 80 dB or so.

There are plenty of discrete or semi-discrete solutions around from what I saw, but I couldn't find any good ideas for what I am trying to do, especially for rejecting the interferers. One could make a notch filter although that would be too area-intensive to make on an IC.

I found some material on photodetector frontends for other applications (communication links) but they don't need to bother much about these sort of interferers.

My gut-feeling is that a nonlinear approach would be most promising. I've got to work in a 0.35 um CMOS process with a few analog options thrown in.

I would appreciate any pointers or reference material.

Thanks,
Vivek