A 60 GHz Current-Reuse LO-Boosting Mixer in 90 nm CMOS

Abstract

This letter presents a 60 GHz direct down-conversion mixer in a 90 nm CMOS. The mixer consists of an RF transconductance stage, a switching stage, an LO amplification stage, a balun and a buffer amplifier, and employs a current-reuse LO-boosting technique for low power consumption with small LO input power. The measured conversion gain of the differential IF output is 12 dB at an input LO power of -13 dBm. The mixer consumes 8.8 mW and the measured 3 dB IF bandwidth is greater than 1.2 GHz. To the best of our knowledge, this mixer achieves the highest conversion gain with the lowest LO input power of all published 60 GHz band CMOS mixers.