Abstract:
A low noise and high conversion gain mixer is presented in this work which is effectively utilizing the differential biasing
condition, separately for the transconductance stage and the switching stage, due to the folded double-balanced current reuse design.
This has provided a great opportunity to work on the noise performance by reducing the noise figure separately for both stages. The
mixer’s architecture has been planned initially for the C-band and has been tested for the same, then the design parameters have been
scaled with the same topology for the K- band (23 to 25 GHz). In this range of RF bandwidth, the proposed mixer’s architecture shows
the highest conversion gain of 24.2 dB, additionally with an excellent noise performance (noise figure of 7.9 dB) where a -3 dBm signal
power has been fed from the local oscillator (LO). A higher extent of linearity has also been achieved with the 1-dB compression point
of -17.8 dBm at the RF frequency of 24 GHz. From 23 to 25 GHz, the LO-to-RF, LO-to-IF isolations are approximately 36 dB and 30
dB, respectively. Implemented double balance current reuse architecture of the proposed mixer shows a power dissipation of 26.8 mW
with a relatively higher power supply bias of 2.5 V. All the simulations have been performed on Advanced Design System (Keysight
Technology) with 130 nm RF-CMOS (UMC) technology.
