A Wideband and Low-Power Distributed Cascode Mixer Using Inductive Feedback.

Area of Science:

• Electrical Engineering
• Microwave Engineering
• Integrated Circuit Design

Background:

• Future mobile communications require mixers that operate across a wide frequency spectrum with minimal power consumption.
• Existing mixer designs often face trade-offs between bandwidth, gain, and power efficiency.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and characterize a wideband, low-power distributed cascode mixer for next-generation mobile communication systems.
• To achieve high conversion gain and excellent radio frequency (RF) and local oscillator (LO) isolation in a compact form factor.

Main Methods:

• Implementation of a distributed cascode mixer architecture inspired by distributed amplifiers (DAs).
• Incorporation of inductive positive feedback for enhanced conversion gain and reduced power consumption.
• Fabrication using a 130 nm commercial complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) process.

Main Results:

• The mixer demonstrates conversion gain from -2.9 to 3.1 dB across 4-30 GHz and -1.9 to 0.4 dB across 54-66 GHz.
• Achieved excellent LO-RF isolation exceeding 15 dB over the entire 0.2-67 GHz measurement band.
• Exhibits ultra-low power consumption (within 12 mW) and a compact chip size (0.056 mm²).

Conclusions:

• The proposed distributed cascode mixer effectively integrates wideband operation, high conversion gain, and low power consumption.
• This design is suitable for emerging applications including ultra-wideband (UWB), 5G, and Wireless Gigabit (WiGig) communications.
• The compact size and performance metrics make it a viable solution for mobile communication devices.