Double-balanced 130–180 GHz passive and balanced 145–165 GHz active mixers in 45 nm CMOS

This paper presents wideband passive and active mixers in the 100–200 GHz range. The mixers are built using a 45nm CMOS SOI process with an ft of 220 GHz when referenced to the top metal layer. The passive double-balanced mixer results in a conversion loss of 12–13 dB from 130–180 GHz (including balun, transmission line and GSG pad losses) and achieves optimal performance with 3 dBm of LO power (referenced to the GSG LO pads). The active mixer achieves a conversion loss of 4.5 dB with a 3-dB bandwidth of 145–165 GHz, and consumes only 10 mW of DC power from a 1.5 V supply. The application areas are in wideband Gbps communications, imaging arrays with large IF bandwidths, and mm-wave spectrometers. To our knowledge, this work represents the first demonstration of high performance CMOS mixers in the 130–180 GHz frequency range.