Design a Folded Mixer with High Conversion Gain for 2-11GHz WiMAX System

Abstract

The mixer is a crucial circuit block in a WiMax system receiver. The performance of a mixer depends on three specifications: conversion gain, linearity and noise figure. Many mixers have been recently proposed for UWB and wideband systems; however, they either cannot achieve the high conversion gain required for a WiMAX system or they are prone to high power consumption. In this paper, a folded mixer with a high conversion gain is designed for a 2-11GHz WiMAX system and it can achieve a 20MHz IF output signal. From the simulation results, the proposed folded mixer achieves a conversion gain of 18.9 to 21.5dB for the full bandwidth. With a 0.2 to 4.4dBm IIP3, the NF is 13.5 to 17.6dB. The folded mixer is designed using TSMC 0.18µm CMOS technology. The core power consumption of the mixer is 11.8mW.