A CMOS low voltage down-converter mixer for sub 1V applications

Abstract

Scaling of CMOS technologies caused design of analog and especially RF blocks somehow challenging. The lower voltage supply is the most severe consequence of this reduction. In this paper a novel CMOS active mixer which can operate at low supply voltages by the use of switches connected to voltage supplies, is presented. Contrary to the conventional Gilbert mixer which is based on switching the RF current, in this mixer the load is switched on or off. The design is done in 0.18/spl mu/m CMOS technology for IEEE802.11b/g applications and the voltage supply can be scaled down to 0.8V which is compatible with 60nm CMOS technology. The simulation results show that the NF and IIP3 are better than 17 dB and 8 dBm respectively with 2.4GHz input RF signal. Moreover this design consumes lower power consumption in comparison to similar low voltage works.