Active Wideband 55-100-GHz Downconversion Mixer in 22-nm FDSOI CMOS

This paper presents a wideband active CMOS downconversion mixer for emerging mmWave communication and sensing applications. The designed mixer utilizes transformer coupling between the transconductance stage and switching stage of a classic Gilbert cell mixer to introduce inductive peaking and decouple the stages at DC. This technique efficiently allows the improvement of Gilbert cell mixer bandwidth, gain and linearity. Additionally, the designed mixer structure comprises a transformer-loaded common-source LO buffer and a two-stage wide bandwidth IF amplifier. The complete mixer consumes 33 mW of power from a low 0.8-V supply voltage. The mixer has been implemented with a 22-nm FDSOI CMOS process and its layout area is 0.13 mm
²
. The design achieves a measured peak voltage conversion gain of 3.5 dB and particularly a wide 3-dB RF bandwidth from 55 to 100 GHz, covering a range of mmWave bands with a single device. The mixer also demonstrates a wide 10-GHz IF output bandwidth suitable for high channel bandwidth applications, as well as an input 1-dB gain compression point of -6 dBm.