A low-power RF mixer with harmonic cancellation for IEEE 802.15.4 portable, wearable wireless applications

Abstract

There is an aggressive need for the rapid development of 5G based battery-powered, portable, wearable, wireless applications in the telecommunication industry. The battery-powered devices pose a critical challenge in processing higher data rates while achieving less distortion and low-power consumption. Hence, the problem of power-efficient distortion cancellation needs to be addressed to equip the 5G New Radio (NR) based portable, wearable wireless systems for better performance. This work addresses the problem by proposing a complementary post-distortion harmonic cancellation (CPDHC) technique to improve the linearity of the Mixer used in battery-powered wireless systems. In the proposed CPDHC method, the overall third-order transconductance of the input stage is reduced optimally by the overall third-order transconductance of the auxiliary transistors. This optimal reduction in third-order transconductance retards the growth of third-order harmonics in the circuit, thus improving the linearity performance of the Mixer circuit. From post-layout simulations, the current reuse based Mixer achieves an IIP3 of −6.823 dBm before linearization, and with linearization by CPDHC technique, the IIP3 is improved to 5.05 dBm, resulting in a spurious-free dynamic range (SFDR) of 66.03 dB for 100 MHz channel bandwidth. The CPDHC based Mixer contributes an integrated double-sideband noise figure (DSB-NF) of 12.57 dB and a peak gain of 14.36 dB while consuming 1.25 mW from a 1.2 V supply.