A 21-GHz self-oscillating down-converter mixer

Commercially available integrated radar sensor solutions are at a hard limit of distending their thermal budget. A current-reuse topology of a combined Colpitt´s voltage controlled oscillator and a Gilbert-cell based mixer aimed at radar sensor applications is presented. In addition to that frequency dividers and phase locked-loop components complete the design to take effect of PLL application. In comparison to a conventional cascaded block design with even less functionality, the circuit gains 55% in energy consumption at neglectable performance losses.