A 27 - 57 GHz Down-conversion Mixer with Bulk Injection Technique

A millimeter-wave (mm-Wave) down-conversion mixer biased at Class-B condition with bulk injection (BI) to reduce the local oscillation (LO) power requirement is proposed to enhance the conversion gain (CG) and linearity. The measurement shows this mixer achieves a peak CG of 18 dB, a measured 3-dB radio frequency (RF) simultaneous bandwidth of 27 - 57 GHz (71.4%) and dc power consumption of 6 mW at LO drive power of −7 dBm. The mixer demonstrates a 4-dBm input third-order intercept point (IIP3), a −8-dBm input 1-dB compression point (IP1dB) and a 12.8-dB noise figure (NF) at 39 GHz.

I. Introduction

Millimetre-Wave (mm-Wave) communication systems have attracted extensive attention due to the wide bandwidth to support high data rates. Down-conversion mixer is one of the key components of mm-Wave receivers for communication quality. CMOS down-conversion mixers often need a large local oscillation (LO) swing to achieve good performances. However, it is power hungry to produce a large LO at high frequencies. Hence, a down-conversion mixer working at low LO swing, while maintaining good performance in gain, linearity and noise figure (NF), is desired to save power consumption and alleviate LO driver design complexity.