A novel CMOS current bleeding mixer based on inductive degeneration

A novel CMOS current bleeding mixer based on inductive degeneration has been proposed in this paper. The noise figure of a radio frequency (RF) mixer is considerably affected by the flicker noise. This flicker noise can be tuned down by employing inductive degeneration at source and gate as the degenerative inductors improve the linearity and reduce the noise figure. A conventional current bleeding Gilbert mixer is also designed for analysis and comparison with proposed design. These mixers are designed using 0.18 micron technology. The simulated results show that the proposed mixer design has conversion gain of 12.47 dB, 1.7 dB decrease of noise figure and 3.72 dBm improvement of IIP3 at a maximum LO power of -3 dBm as compared to the conventional bleeding mixer.