This paper presents a multi-band multi-standard receiver architecture for wireless applications, such as 802.11 a/b/g WLAN, and 802.16a WMAN. The targeted frequency bands include licensed bands - 2.3 GHz, 2.5/spl sim/2.7 GHz, and 3.5/spl sim/3.7 GHz, and un-licensed bands - ISM 2.4 GHz and U-NII 5 GHz. The main advantages of the proposed receiver are using a single frequency synthesizer to perform the entire frequency transferring, and each frequency band shares the identical LNA and mixer to reduce chip area. The maximum hardware shared LNA and mixer design are also presented. The S/sub 11/ of the proposed multi-band LNA is below -10 dB from 2 GHz to 6 GHz. The integrated NF of the RF-front-end is 3.18 dB at 2.4 GHz, 3.47 dB at 3.5 GHz, and 5.47 dB at 5.4 GHz. The conversion gain and IIP3 are 35 dB and -16.7 dBm at 2.4 GHz, 34.3 dB and -17.4 dBm at 3.5 GHz, and 30.6 dB and -11.3 dBm at 5 GHz respectively. Using a 0.18 /spl mu/m CMOS process, the multi-mode RF front-end dissipates 56 mW from a 1.8 V supply voltage.