Low power millimeter wave active sige sub-harmonic up-conversion mixer with ultra low driving power

This paper presents a low power sub-harmonic up-convert mixer for 60 GHz unlicensed-band applications and is fabricated using Jazz´s SiGe 0.18 μm high frequency process. The mixer operates with a RF bandwidth of 9 GHz centered at 60 GHz, a LO at 24 GHz and has a wideband of 3.5 GHz around an IF frequency of 12 GHz. It is able to achieve -0.1 dB of conversion gain with a differential common emitter buffer. The mixer is able to meet the high linearity specifications with an input referred P1dB of -12.3 dBm while achieving extremely low LO drive requirements of -14 dBm. The up-conversion mixer is able to achieve a spurious rejection better than 20 dBc with reference to RF frequency. It occupies a silicon area of 880 um × 780 um including both RF and DC probe pads. Mixer core dissipates only 1.7 mA of current from a 1.8 V voltage supply.