A Reformed PSO-Based High Linear Optimized Up-Conversion Mixer for Radar Application

A reformed particle swarm optimization (R_PSO)-based up-conversion mixer circuit is proposed for radar application in this paper. In practice, a non-optimized up-conversion mixer suffers from high power consumption, poor linearity, and conversion gain. Therefore, the R_PSO algorithm is proposed to optimize the up-conversion mixer. The novelty of the proposed R_PSO algorithm is it helps to solve the problem of local optima and premature convergence in traditional particle swarm optimization (T_PSO). Furthermore, in the R_PSO, a velocity position-based convergence (VP_C) and wavelet mutation (W_M) strategy are used to enhance R_PSO's swarm diversity. Moreover, this work also features novel circuit configurations based on the two-fold transconductance path (T_TP), a technique used to improve linearity. A differential common source (D_CS) amplifier is included in the primary transconductance path (P_TP) of the T_TP. As for the subsidiary transconductance path (S_TP), the enhanced cross-quad transconductor (E_CQT) is implemented within the T_TP. A benchmark function verification is conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the R_PSO algorithm. The proposed R_PSO has also been compared with other optimization algorithms such as the genetic algorithm (GA) and the non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm II (NSGA-II). By using R_PSO, the proposed optimized mixer achieves a conversion gain (CG) of 2.5 dB (measured). In this study, the proposed mixer achieves a 1 dB compression point (OP₁dB) of 4.2 dBm with a high linearity. In the proposed mixer, the noise figure (NF) is approximately 3.1 dB. While the power dissipation of the optimized mixer is 3.24 mW. Additionally, the average time for R_PSO to design an up-conversion mixer is 4.535 s. Simulation and measured results demonstrate the excellent performance of the R_PSO optimized up-conversion mixer.