Design of a Low Voltage Highly Linear 2.4 GHz Up-Conversion Mixer in 0.18 μm CMOS Technology

Abstract

This paper presents a low voltage highly linear up-conversion mixer for 2.4 GHz IEEE 802.11b WLAN transmitter applications based on a Chartered 0.18 μm CMOS technology. In the proposed mixer, the double balanced Gilbert cell topology was adopted and the dual resistive current-reuse and current-bleeding techniques in both the driver and switching stages with a capacitive cross-coupling technique were used. The up-conversion mixer can convert a 10 MHz intermediate frequency signal to a 2.4 GHz radio frequency signal, with a local oscillator power of 0 dBm at 2.39 GHz. A comparison with conventional CMOS mixer shows that this up-conversion mixer has advantages of low voltage, low power consumption and high performance. The post-layout simulation results demonstrate that at 2.4 GHz, the circuit provides 7.1 dB of conversion gain and the input-referred third-order intercept point of 11.3 dBm, while drawing only 5 mA for the mixer core under a supply voltage of 1.2 V. The chip area including testing pads is only 0.65 × 0.75 mm.