A HBT-based 300 MHz-12 GHz blocker-tolerant mixer-first receiver

Abstract

A 300 MHz-12 GHz HBT-based mixer-first receiver in 130 nm BiCMOS is presented. The mixer core is composed of four SiGe HBTs driven by quadrature LO pulses with a shared emitter RF input and feedback from the baseband to HBT bases to generate baseband-to-RF impedance-transparency. This is analogous to effects seen in CMOS passive-mixer-first receivers, but at higher frequencies than attainable with traditional CMOS topologies. LO circuitry is also implemented in emitter-coupled logic to generate 25% duty-cycle LO pulses capable of driving the high frequency mixer, which achieves a measured out-of-band 1 dB compression point of+10dBm at 9 GHz.