30-43 GHz Cascode Sub-harmonic Mixer in 0.13-μm CMOS Technology

Abstract

A 30-43 GHz cascode sub-harmonic mixer is presented using 0.13-μm CMOS process. This mixer comprises cascode RF amplifier stage, sub-harmonic mixer core and IF low pass filter. By utilizing cascode structure and LO-gate pumped mixer transistor, a novel bias condition with negative gate-source voltage and zero drain-source voltage is proposed. This mixer achieves resistive sub-harmonic mixing as well as alleviates the contradiction between conversion loss and port isolation of single FET mixer. This sub-harmonic mixer achieves conversion loss of 5.8-10 dB with LO power of 6dBm and 2LO-to-RF isolation better than 36dB during 30-43GHz. The measured intermediated frequency 3dB-bandwidth is from 30 MHz to 5 GHz and the input 1dB compression point is -9dBm.