Analysis and Optimization of Current-Driven Passive Mixers in Narrowband Direct-Conversion Receivers

Properties of the current-driven passive mixer are explored to maximize its performance in a zero-IF receiver. Since there is no reverse isolation between the RF and baseband sides of the mixer, the mixer reflects the baseband impedance to the RF and vice versa through simple frequency shifting. It is also shown that in an IQ down-conversion system the lack of reverse isolation causes a mutual interaction between the two quadrature mixers, which results in different high- and low-side conversion gains, and unexpected IIP2 and IIP3 values. With a thorough and accurate mathematical analysis it is shown how to design this mixer and its current buffer, and how to size components to get the best linearity, conversion gain and noise figure while alleviating the IQ cross-talk problem.