Three down-conversion mixers for low-voltage, balanced 900 MHz wireless applications are introduced. The mixers are implemented in a 0.8 μm BiCMOS process and based on the four transistor BJT switching quad widely used in Gilbert cells. The mixers are designed to operate at a supply voltage of 1.5 V and without external components. The implemented mixers have a few decibels of conversion loss, a third-order input intercept point of a few dBm and a single sideband noise figure of about 15 dB. It is demonstrated that modest mixer operation performance is achieved with a DC power consumption of only 1 mW. Also planar inductors on silicon and bond-wire inductors are shown to be valuable to achieve a return loss of about 9 dB for input and output ports of a mixer. The measurement results for the mixers as well as the lumped element models for the used planar inductor and for the bondwire are presented.
[1]
Roland E. Best.
Phase-Locked Loops
,
1984
.
[2]
Hannu Kattelus,et al.
IC compatible planar inductors on silicon
,
1997
.
[3]
J. R. Long,et al.
A 1.9 GHz low-voltage silicon bipolar receiver front-end for wireless personal communications systems
,
1995,
IEEE J. Solid State Circuits.
[4]
J. Long,et al.
The modeling, characterization, and design of monolithic inductors for silicon RF IC's
,
1997,
IEEE J. Solid State Circuits.
[5]
W. H. Ku,et al.
Low voltage performance of a microwave CMOS Gilbert cell mixer
,
1997,
IEEE J. Solid State Circuits.
[6]
Floyd M. Gardner,et al.
Phaselock techniques
,
1984,
IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics.
[7]
F. M. Gardner.
Phaselock Techniques, 2nd edition
,
1979
.