An Integrated 20-26 GHz CMOS Up-Conversion Mixer with Low Power Consumption

A fully integrated 20-26 GHz broadband up-conversion mixer with low power consumption is demonstrated on 90nm CMOS technology in this paper. This mixer has a single-ended input and a multi-layer Marchand balun is used for converting the output of the single-balanced Gilbert cell topology to a single-ended output. This balun employs capacitive coupling between two metal layers and includes slotted shields to reduce substrate losses. The die size is 650mum times 570mum. At 22.1 GHz, the integrated mixer achieves a conversion gain of 2 dB with a maximum power dissipation of only 11.1mW from a 1.2V dc power supply at LO power of 5 dBm. Input referred 1-dB compression point is -14.8 dBm. The LO and RF return loss are better than 10 dB for frequencies between 20-26 GHz.