A V-Band High Gain Sub-Harmonic Down-Conversion Mixer Using PMOS Cross Couple Pair to Implement Negative Impedance and Current-Bleeding Technique

In this brief, we present a high gain sub-harmonic mixer using PMOS cross couple pair (CCP) to implement the negative impedance and current-bleeding technique at 60 GHz. In order to increase conversion gain, we adopt the PMOS CCP for the g
_m
-boost technique to raise the overall transconductance between RF and LO stages. We also use it for current bleeding to reduce the loss of LO switches. Thus, the overall conversion gain can be improved by PMOS CCP. At IF stage, the differential signal is converted to single-ended signal by an active balun. The active balun not only can offer gain, but also can cancel out common-mode noise to improve noise figure. The measured peak gain is 6.95 dB at 61 GHz under LO power of 1 dBm at 30 GHz. Under the different four channels at 60 GHz, the measured IP1dB is better than -9.4 dBm. The measured 3-dB RF bandwidth is from 57-67 GHz and 3-dB IF bandwidth is 1.1 GHz. Total dc power consumption is only 16 mW at 1 dBm LO power for 1.2 V supplied voltage. To our best knowledge, this subharmonic mixer has the highest gain and better FoM among active mixers at V-band.