A high gain, wide band (2–10 GHz), and low noise active balun merged folded mixer for the full-band UWB application

Abstract

A high gain, wide band (2-10GHz) but low noise mixer is presented and demonstrated. It uses a Gilbert type folded structure with an active balun as the input trans-conductance stage and a PMOS switch stage. Because of the structure, each stage can be separately set its bias current to achieve high gain and low noise. The implemented circuit in the 0.18 um CMOS technology exhibits a high conversion gain (CG), 17.6 dB at 4 GHz and 8.1 dB at 10 GHz, a SSB noise figure (NF) of 15.6 dB, an IIP3 of -3.4 dBm to +2 dBm, and an isolation of RF-LO of -144 dB. The mixer power consumption is about 7.8 mW under a 1.8 V power supply.