Radar Receiver Circuits

Even though MOSFET has been invented much earlier [1] than bipolar transistor [2], the commercial mass-volume foundry implementation of bipolar technology hasbeen introduced more than a decade prior to CMOS. Therefore, some of the classical analog circuit topologies e.g. Gilbert cell mixer or current-mode logic (CML), originally developed for bipolar transistors, were directly adopted in CMOS. However, CMOS technology has differing characteristics that have to be considered during circuit design. Some properties can be utilized to gain advantages. For example, true CMOS logic circuits consume much less current than their CML counterparts. On the other hand, MOS transistors unlike bipolar suffer from high 1/f noise and may hinder straightforward implementation of the Gilbert cell mixer topology for the direct down-conversion architecture. Several circuit techniques have been developed in CMOS in order to overcome this problem [3], [4]. An additional common approach, adopted from III/V technologies, is to use passive resistive mixers [5]. This technique is well suited for MOSFETs, since these may act as passive voltagecontrolled switches, but it is not applicable for bipolar transistors since these act as current-controlled switches.

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