A dynamic current-bleeding technique for a low-noise and high-gain CMOS mixer

Abstract

This letter presents a low-noise and high-gain CMOS mixer that uses a simple dynamic current-bleeding (DCB) technique. The conventional static current-bleeding (SCB) technique has high conversion gain and low noise figure at a high intermediate frequency (IF) but also has moderately high direct-mechanism flicker noise. Meanwhile, the conventional DCB technique possesses completely opposite characteristics. The proposed DCB technique obtains not only low direct flicker noise and low noise figure at high IF, but also has high conversion gain by combining only the advantageous features of both conventional techniques. Measurement results show a conversion gain of 21.2 dB and a noise figure of 16.3 dB at 10 kHz and 5.6 dB at 10 MHz, while the mixer consumes 4.2 mW at a 1.2 V supply voltage. It was implemented in a 0.11-μm CMOS process with a chip area of 0.8 × 0.8 mm2. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 59:1267–1271, 2017