A 2.4 GHz 2.2 mW current reusing passive mixer with gm-boosted common-gate TIA in 180 nm CMOS

Abstract

This paper presents a 2.4 GHz I&Q passive mixer with 36 dB conversion gain and low biasing current of 1.2 mA. A pre-amplifier sharing biasing current of the trans-conductance stage is used to improve conversion gain and noise performance without dissipating extra power. A gm-boosted common gate structure is proposed as the trans-impedance amplifier (TIA), which consumes less power than an OTA based TIA in traditional passive mixers. A prototype of the proposed mixer is designed and fabricated in SMIC 180 nm CMOS process. The 36 dB conversion gain, −11 dBm IIP3 and 12 dB NF are achieved in measurements.