A K-Band Low-Noise and High-Gain Down-Conversion Active Mixer Using 0.18-m CMOS Technology

This paper fabricates a K-Band 24GHz high-gain, low-power down-conversion mixer using a standard TSMC 0.18-m CMOS technology. The architecture that is used is based on that of a Gilbert cell mixer. Transformer coupling technology is used at the node between the transconductance stage and the local oscillator switches stage. The conversion gain, the noise figure and the size of the chip area performance are significantly better, so this mixer with specific RF parameters gives excellent performance. The simulation (post-sim) results for the proposed mixer show a 15-19dB power conversion gain, a -8.3dBm input third-order intercept point (IIP3) at 24GHz, a 10-12.3dB signal side band (SSB) noise figure and an RF bandwidth of 20-26GHz. The core power consumption for the mixer is 3.096mW and the output buffer power consumption is 3.122mW. The total dc power consumption for this mixer, including the output buffers, is 6.22mW. The total chip size for the K-Band mixer is 0.95x1.14mm(2).