a distributed circuit the transistor 39 s capacitances are absorbed into the t line hence until the cutoff frequency of the t line itself is approached the input impedance and the bandwidth to a certain degree remains constant turning in detail to the figures an example embodiment of a ddcr rf front end circuit 10 is shown in fig1 in which composite cells 16 and 18 perform both low noise amplification and rf mixing the circuit 10 includes two stages 12 and 14 distributed along the input artificial rf t line 11 which are preferably monolithic i e fabricated on the same semiconductor substrate each stage 12 and 14 includes a composite cell 16 and 18 comprising a current commuting mixer 24 and a low noise amplifier lna 28 shown as a merged low noise transconductance amplifier lnta m 1 29 in fig2 which is a schematic of another example embodiment of the ddcr rf front end circuit 10 shown in fig1 to mitigate the problems of large area and high power consumption in conventional distributed circuits the ddcr rf front end circuit 10 preferably incorporates a minimum number of stages here only two stages 12 and 14 are realized using three inductors 34 36 38 one stage 12 is used for the i component and the other stage 14 is used for the q component of the uwb signal resulting in the optimum use of the signal appearing.