Highly linear reconfigurable mixer designed for environment-aware receiver

A 4-state, highly linear, reconfigurable mixer is presented in this paper. The proposed mixer is an essential part of the environment-aware receiver, introduced in this article. A set of switches are used in the LO and IF stages of the mixer to digitally tune the linearity of the mixer in exchange for lower power consumption. Three sets of cross-coupled pairs are utilized in the mixer to dynamically inject the proper current into the mixer and improve the linearity of each state of the mixer. The proposed mixer is designed using a standard 130-nm CMOS process. The mixer delivers 10, 6.2, 1.8, and −2.9 dBm of third-order intercept point (IIP3) while the average NF is 9.3 dB and varies only 1 dB in different states. Conversion gain of the mixer varies within 16.8 to 7.8 dB in 0.5 to 7 GHz. The mixer consumes 2.4 to 9.6 mW from a 1.2V supply.

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