Design of a 2.4 GHz High-Performance Up-Conversion Mixer with Current Mirror Topology

Abstract

In this paper, a low voltage low power up-conversion mixer, designed in a Chartered 0.18 μm RFCMOS technology, is proposed to realize the transmitter front-end in the frequency band of 2.4 GHz. The up-conversion mixer uses the current mirror topology and current-bleeding technique in both the driver and switching stages with a simple degeneration resistor. The proposed mixer converts an input of 100 MHz intermediate frequency (IF) signal to an output of 2.4 GHz radio frequency (RF) signal, with a local oscillator (LO) power of 2 dBm at 2.3 GHz. A comparison with conventional CMOS up-conversion mixer shows that this mixer has advantages of low voltage, low power consumption and high-performance. The post-layout simulation results demonstrate that at 2.4 GHz, the circuit has a conversion gain of 7.1 dB, an input-referred third-order intercept point (IIP3) of 7.3 dBm and a noise figure of 11.9 dB, while drawing only 3.8 mA for the mixer core under a supply voltage of 1.2 V. The chip area including testing pads is only 0.62×0.65 mm2.