Design of inductorless, low power, high conversion gain CMOS subharmonic mixer for 2.4 GHz application

This work describes the design and implementation of an inductorless, low power, high conversion gain fully differential subharmonic down-conversion mixer for 2.4 GHz application. A complementary current-reuse technique is adapted between the transconductance stage and LO switching stage to boost the conversion gain without additional power consumption by reusing the DC current of the LO switching stage. The proposed design has been extracted and simulated in 0.13 μm standard CMOS technology. With a power consumption of 6 mW at a supply voltage of 1.2 V, the proposed subharmonic mixer exhibits a high conversion gain (CG) of 15.18 dB, a noise figure (NF) of 16.33 dB, an 1-dB compression point (P1dB) of -16.3 dBm and an input-referred third-order intercept point (IIP3) of -6.72 dBm.