Improved Conversion Gain with High SFDR and Highly Linear RF Mixer Using Inductive Gate Biasing Technique for Low Power WAS and Radio LAN Applications

Abstract

Wireless access systems (WASs) are ubiquitous, fulfilling various technological needs in our day to day life. In order to meet the latest requirements in terms of power, size and cost, they impose very stringent specifications w.r.t. the performance of various subsystems in them. Inductive gate biasing technique (IGBT) is proposed for performance enhancement of active mixer, a subsystem of RF front end of any superheterodyne receiver, to cater the need of low power WAS including Radio LAN (RLAN) applications. It features a double balanced down conversion mixer topology with inductive source degeneration and active loads along with single ended to differential converters (SE2DCs) for both RF and LO inputs of the mixer. Post layout simulation (PLS) results account for a conversion gain (CG) of 13.62, 93.58 dB spurious free dynamic range (SFDR), 39.10 dBm third order input intercept point (IIP3) and a single side band-noise figure (SSB-NF) of 12.09 dB at 3.49 mW of D.C power consumption in 180 nm CMOS technology with 1.8 V supply voltage for 5.15 GHz RF and 100 MHz IF.