A Low-Power and High-Gain Ultra-Wideband Down-Conversion Active Mixer in 0.18- $$\upmu $$ μ m SiGe Bi-CMOS Technology

Abstract

This paper presents an ultra-wideband down-conversion mixer chip covering the frequency range from 3.1 to 10.6 GHz by using TSMC 0.18 $$\upmu $$μm SiGe BiCMOS technology. The architecture used is based on Gilbert-cell mixer, the combination of MOS transistors and HBT BJT transistor device characteristics. In the proposed circuit, a LO CMOS series-parallel switched topology is adopted to reduce the supply voltage and dc consumption for UWB system. The measured results of the proposed mixer achieve: $$\hbox {Gain}= 9.8$$Gain=9.8---10.6 dB, $$\hbox {flatness} =0.8$$flatness=0.8 dB, IIP$$3 = -8$$3=-8 dBm at 7.26 GHz, and so on. Port-to-port isolations (LO---RF, LO---IF, and RF---IF) are better than about ź40 dB, and the total dc power consumption with output buffers is 4.3 mW from a 1 V supply voltage. The current output buffer is about 3.7 mW. The mixer topology presented in this paper results suitable for low-power UWB system applications.