Design of a 5.9GHz ultra-low power sub-harmonic mixer for Internet of vehicles applications

This paper presents an ultra-low power down-conversion sub-harmonic mixer for Internet of vehicles (IoV) applications. The proposed mixer adopts a frequency doubler based topology to maximize the second harmonic of local oscillation (LO) signal for the frequency down conversion. The dedicated design was implemented in a 0.13-μm CMOS technology and exhibits a conversion gain of 10.3 dB at 5.9 GHz with a 0 dBm LO power level at 2.9 GHz. The core circuit of the proposed sub-harmonic mixer consumes only 187 uA current from a 1.5 V voltage supply. The mixer has a core area of 0.36 × 0.4 mm2.