Trade-Offs in CMOS Mixer Design

Abstract

This chapter has presented a brief look at CMOS downconversion mixers. The authors have endeavoured to present a more intuitive look at the design of CMOS mixers. Before one can appreciate trade-offs between the various figures of merit of CMOS mixers, a good understanding of these figures of merit is necessary. Thus explanations of the various figures of merit for CMOS downconversion mixers was presented in Section 27.3, and the trade-offs between these figures of merit was highlighted in Section 27.4. In the design of CMOS mixers, it is often the case that various figures of merit can be traded-off against each other by using different mixer architectures. Therefore, this chapter has also presented various CMOS mixer architectures. Each architecture provides certain advantages at the expense of other figures of merit, and hence the suitability of each architecture to an application has to be carefully evaluated.