A Current Bleeding CMOS Mixer Featuring <i>LO</i>Amplification Based on Current-Reused Topology

A double balanced Gilbert-cell class-A amplifier bleeding mixer (DBGC CAAB mixer) is proposed and implemented. The injection current is utilized to amplify the local oscillator (LO) signal to improve the performance of the transconductor stage. The DBGC CAAB mixer achieves a conversion gain of 17.5 dB at -14 dBm LO power, and the noise figure is suppressed from 45 dB to 10.7 dB. It is important to stress that the new configuration will not drain additional power in contrast to the former current bleeding mixers. This topology dramatically relieves the requirement of the LO power. The DBGC CAAB mixer is implemented by using 0.18-μm RFCMOS technology and operates at the 2.4 GHz ISM application with 10 MHz intermediate frequency. The power consumption is 12 mA at 1.5 V supply voltage. The DBGC CAAB mixer features the highest FOM figure within a wide range of LO power.

Fully-integrated ultra-wide band LNA in 0.18μm CMOS technology for 3-10 GHz applications

The paper presents a fully integrated ultra-wide band(UWB)low noise amplifier(LNA)for 3-10 GHz applications.It employs self-biased resistive-feedback and current-reused technique to achieve wide input matching and low power characteristics.An improved biased architecture is adopted in the second stage to attain a better gain-compensation performance.The design is verified with TSMC standard 1 P6 M 0.18μm RF CMOS process.The measurement results show that the parasitic problem of the transistors at high frequencies is solved.A high and flat S21 of 9.7±1.5 dB and the lowest NF 3.5 dB are achieved in the desired frequency band.The power consumption is only 7.5 mA under 1.6 V supply.The proposed LNA achieves broadband flat gain,low noise,and high linearity performance simultaneously,allowing it to be used in 3-10 GHz UWB applications.

A wideband LC-VCO for MMMS applications

A fully integrated wideband voltage-controlled-oscillator(VCO) based on current-reused topology is presented. The overall scheme contains two sub-VCOs, which are controlled by a switch to cover a wide output frequency range. Fabricated in TSMC 65 nm CMOS technology, the measured output frequency of the VCO ranges from 3.991 GHz to 9.713 GHz,achieving a tuning range of 83.5%. And the worst and best phase noise at 1 MHz offset are-93.09 dBc/Hz and-111.97 dBc/Hz, respectively. With a 1.2 V supply voltage, the VCO core consumes a current of 3.7-5.1 mA across the entire frequency range. The chip area is 0.51 mm^2, including the pads. Moreover, the proposed VCO provides a figure-of-merit-with-tuning-range(FOM_T) of-191 dBc/Hz to-197 dBc/Hz.

A low voltage low power up-conversion mixer for WSN application

This paper presents an up-conversion mixer for 2.4-2.4835 GHz wireless sensor networks （WSN） in 0.18 μm RF CMOS technology. It was based on a double-balanced Gilbert cell type, with two Gilbert cells having quadrature modulation applied. Current-reuse and cross positive feedback techniques were applied in the mixer to boost conversion gain; the current source stage was removed from the mixer to improve linearity. Measured results exhibited that under a 1 V power supply, the conversion gain was 5 dB, the input referred 1 dB compression point was -11 dBm and the IIP3 was -0.75 dBm, while it only consumed 1.4 mW.