Low power up-conversion mixer with gain control function

This work develops a low-power up-conversion mixer. The developed mixer integrates the LC parallel resonant technique, the inverter amplifier technique, the resistive-feedback technique, and the resistive source degeneration technique. Therefore, it has higher conversion gain, low power consumption, a large IF bandwidth, and gain control functionality, which provides favorable linearity. The output radio frequency of the proposed mixer is between 1950 MHz and 2000 MHz, and the input frequencies are 50 MHz to 100 MHz. The measured conversion gains of the mixer in high-gain mode and low-gain mode are 9.5 dB and 1 dB, respectively; the measured input third-order intercept points (IIP3) in high-gain and low-gain modes are 0 dBm and 7 dBm, respectively. The DC operation point of the proposed mixer does not differ between the modes. The mixer dissipates 2 mW of power at a supply voltage of 1.2 V, and is used in a Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company 90 nm RF CMOS process. The area of the chip is 0.7 mm2.