Wideband millimeter-wave active and passive mixers in 28 nm bulk CMOS technology

Abstract

A compact 129-140 GHz Gilbert-cell mixer for up-conversion and 127-140 GHz image-rejection (IR) resistive mixer for down-conversion are realized for a 140-GHz transceiver in 28 nm bulk CMOS technology. A wide 7.5-GHz intermediate frequency (IF) tuning range is obtained for both mixers. The measurement results show a 6 to 12 dB conversion loss for the Gilbert-cell mixer with a layout size of 0.455mm <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> including the probing pads where the core area is only 0.005mm <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> . The mixer consumes only 8 mW of DC power and exhibits better than 42 dB LO-to-RF isolation. The resistive mixer shows 20 dB image rejection ratio and better than 40 dB LO-to-RF suppression with only 0 dBm LO-power. The layout size of the mixer is 0.543mm <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> including the probing pads.