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Wideband receiver (RX) and transmitter (TX) RF front-ends for wireless universal radio applications are presented. The RX is comprised of a two-stage low-noise amplifier (LNA) applying feedback and shunt peaking, a combiner buffer for performance boosting, and an inverter-based in-phase/quadrature (IQ) down-conversion mixer. The wideband LNA provides input matching of better than -\ 10 dB from dc to beyond 10 GHz. The conversion gain (CG) of the RX front-end has a peak value of 31 dB with a 3-dB bandwidth up to 9 GHz. The minimal noise figure is 6 dB and kept below 9 dB within the entire operational bandwidth. The RX has a linearity in terms of intermodulation distortion of better than -\12 dBm. The direct conversion TX involving inverter-based IQ modulator and Darlington-type pre-power amplifier features operation up to 9 GHz with 10-dB mean CG and an average output power of 4 dBm at 1-dB compression level. Excluding buffers and local oscillator generation, the RX and TX dissipate 54 and 84 mW, respectively, from a 1.2-V voltage supply. The circuit prototypes have been fabricated in a standard 65-nm CMOS low-power process without any additional RF options and occupy an area of only 0.77 \ mm^2 and 0.53 \ mm^2, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]