A 0.6V 380µW −14dBm LO-input 2.4GHz double-balanced current-reusing single-gate CMOS mixer with cyclic passive combiner

Abstract

A mixer is one of the bottlenecks in achieving the low-voltage operation of a receiver. Most of the mixer topologies recently reported for low-voltage and low-power applications can be categorized into bulk-injection mixers or switching mixers. However, the bulk-injection mixer requires a large LO power with an accurate modeling of the back-gate effect [1]. Switching mixers also require a large LO power in the range of 0dBm for ideal switching operation [2–5]. In this work, a 0.6V mixer for Bluetooth specification with a target sensitivity of −90dBm [6], which requires a NF of 12dB and IIP3 of −7dBm, is described. None of the previously published designs [1–5] satisfies these specifications. A single-gate mixer [7], which was formerly used for mm-wave applications, is modified to fit the low-voltage and low-power 2.4GHz-band application.