24–40 GHz Gain-Boosted Wideband CMOS Down-Conversion Mixer Employing Body-Effect Control for 5G NR Applications

Abstract

This brief presents a gain-boosted wideband complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS) down-conversion mixer with body-effect control, which operates in a frequency range of 24–40 GHz. In the proposed design, the body voltage of mixer switches is adaptively controlled with respect to an applied local oscillator (LO) signal to enhance the switching capability. This technique improves the conversion gain (CG) and noise figure (NF) of the mixer without increasing LO signal power and current consumption. To validate the concept of the design, conventional and proposed mixers are implemented using a 65-nm CMOS process and their performance is compared. At an identical LO power of 5 dBm, the proposed wideband mixer demonstrates the CGs of 7.2 dB and 4.8 dB and NFs of 12.3 dB and 13.5 dB at 28 GHz and 39 GHz, respectively. Compared with the conventional mixer design, the CG and NF of the proposed mixer are improved by 2.2–3.3 dB and 1.2–2 dB in all operating frequency bands, respectively. The conventional and proposed mixers consume the identical die size of 0.87 mm <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${\times }\,\,0.46$ </tex-math></inline-formula> mm and the power of 10.3 mW with the nominal supply of 1.0 V.