High Linearity Wide Band Passive Mixer for Ku-Band Applications in a 180nm CMOS Technology

A design of a passive mixer is presented. Linearity and bandwidth are the critical problems to mitigate in this work. Both up-conversion and down-conversion are supported. Fabricated in a 180nm CMOS technology, the mixer includes a LO active balun, a LO buffer and a RF passive balun. The LO buffer is designed to improve the sensitivity of LO signal. The mixer covers a wide RF frequency range of 6-18GHz. With a unique double-balanced passive mixer design, the resulted mixer achieves a 23.0dBm IIP3 at down-conversion, and a 23.4dBm IIP3 at up-conversion. The passive mixer attains −10.5dB conversion gain at down-conversion and −9.8dB conversion gain at up-conversion with LO driving at 0dBm. The DC power consumption of the proposed mixer is 500mW, due to the LO active balun and the LO buffer.