V-band low-power Darlington-pair gate-pumped mixer with thin-film LC-hybrid linear combiner in 90 nm CMOS

Presented is a V-band low-power Darlington-pair double-balanced gate-pumped mixer with a thin-film (TF) LC-hybrid linear combiner in 90 nm CMOS technology. The compact TF LC-hybrid linear combiner is used to feed the differential RF and LO signals to a gate-pumped mixer. Meanwhile, it provides high port-to-port isolations of the mixer. The proposed gate-pumped mixer achieves a -0.76 dB conversion gain, a -7 dBm 1 dB compression point, and a +8.5 dBm input IP3 under a low LO power of -2 dBm. The core power consumption is only 2.8 mW from a 1 V supply. The chip size with all testing pads and dummy blocks is only 0.52 mm².