A 1.8-2.

6GHz RF CMOS Up-Conversion Mixer for

Wideband Applications
Xiaopeng Sun, Fengyi Huang*,Xusheng Tang, Dawei Zhao
Institute of RF- & OE-ICs, National Mobile Communications Research Laboratory
Southeast University, No.2 Sipailou
Nanjing 210096, China
*
fyhuang@seu.edu.cn

Abstract-Mixer is one of the main modules of a transmitter signal. You can get a difference frequency component (frequency
system, and its performance will heavily impact the functionality of ω1-ω2) and sum frequency component (frequency ω1+ω2). With
the entire transmitter. Gilbert cell structure can achieve high degree
of RF (Radio Frequency) and LO (Local Oscillator) isolation, thus
the LO signal amplitude at certain extent, the magnitudes of
loosening filtering output requirements.. This paper presents a up- difference frequency component and sum frequency component
conversion mixer, designed in a standard TSMC0.13­m CMOS are proportional to the magnitude of the input signal. The
technology, for 1.8-2.6GHz wideband applications. The up- required frequency can be selected from the band-pass filter[2].
conversion mixer is configured with the structure of Gilbert Cell The outline of this paper is as follows. In section II, the
and takes advantage of current bleeding. The post simulation results circuit of mixer is described. The layout and simulation results
indicated that under 1.2V power supply the conversion gain was
more than 1.1dB and the input IP3 was more than 6.45dBm, the
are presented in section III. Finallyˈsummary of this work is
total area of the layout is 0.82×0.7 mm2. followed in section IV
II. CIRCUIT
Keywords- cmos; mixer; Gilbert; linearity
A. The Principles of Mixer
Gilbert mixer is a common structure which is usually used
I. INTRODUCTION
in active mixers. It has several advantages. Gilbert mixer has a
At present time rapid development of communications certain gain with appropriate load. It can lower the amplitude of
systems leads to increase the number of transmission channels, LO. It gains a better port isolation. It also has a low noise figure
rising-up the quality of equipment. The number of wireless because of the double-balanced structure [3]. These advantages
networks customers is increasing. And a lot of new were required in this design, and Gilbert mixers were used as
communication systems, that use low power levels and works in core cell here, the topology is shown in Fig.1.
broadband frequency ranges appeared. Broadband
communication techniques have attracted great interests in both
academic and industry in the past few years for applications in
short-range and high-speed wireless mobile systems. The great
potential of broadband lies in the fact that it can co-exist with the
already licensed spectrum users and can still pave the way for a
wide range of applications. However, this wide bandwidth
complicates the circuit level implementation of key RF blocks
like the power amplifier (PA), transmit/receive switch, low noise
amplifier (LNA) and mixers in an UWB transceiver [1].
As a three-port device, Mixer multiplies two signals in
time domain. It assumes that both sinusoidal type signal input to
a multiplier, then the output of the multiplier can get sum
frequency component and difference frequency component,
which can be expressed as:
AB
䯴 Acos ω1t )(B cos ω2t) = [cos(ω1 − ω2 )t + cos(ω1 + ω2 )t] 
2 Figure 1. Schematic of the proposed mixer
One of input sinusoidal signals is a fixed rate of the The transconductance stage, M5 and M6, is used to transform
vibration signal (LO), provided by a local oscillator, and the the base-band input voltage signal to current, which is then
other is the received RF signal or the transmitted low-frequency commutated by the switching pair, M1, M2 and M3, M4, to realize

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 frequency translation. The degenerative resistor R3 is employed B. Current bleeding techniques
to increase the linearity of the circuit, which does not cause the The idea behind current bleeding, shown as IBLD in Fig.
voltage drop and still has the same linearity improvement[4]. 2(b), has been known for many years and various terminologies
Differential pairs M5~M6 constitute mixer trans- have been used to describe it, such as current bleeding, current
conductance stage. The input RF voltage signal is converted into steering, or more recently, charge injection. For the circuit shown
current, and into the switch to the common source node. If the in Fig. 2(b), bleeding allows control of the DC currents for the
vibration signal is strong enough, transistors M1~M4 can be switching transistors (M4 and M5)separately from that of the
approximated to be an ideal switch, and then double-balanced driver stage (M6). Bleeding can enable ID5 to be higher than (ID4
mixer output current is as follows[5]: +ID5).
I0 = I 01 − I 02 = ( I1 − I 2 ) − ( I 4 − I 3 ) The third-order intercept point (IP3) and the conversion
gain of the mixer are proportional to the square root of the driver
= sgn(cos ωLO t )( I B + is ) − sgn(cos ωLO t )( I B − is ) (2) stage bias current[6]. For a conventional single-balanced mixer,
= 2sgn(cos ωLO t )is as shown in Fig. 2(a), however, increases in the driver stage
The signal sgn(cos¹LOt) is a kind of square wave signal, current (IDl)force the reduction of load resistance RLl and RL2. For
whose amplitude is 1, and its frequency is ȦLO which the circuit shown in Fig. 2(b), bleeding can allow a higher
conversion gain through the higher load resistor because part of
­-1䰆cos ωLO t < 0 the driver stage current is being steered from the switching
sgn(cos ωLO t ) = ® (3)
¯1䰆cos ωLO t > 0 transistors. Furthermore, with bleeding, either the switching
Process the square wave signal sgn(cos¹LOt) by Fourier transistors could be operated at a lower gate-source voltage or
smaller size transistors could be used. In either case, for a given
transform:
level of local oscillator (LO) signal, bleeding helps to improve
∞
sgn(cos ω t ) = ¦ An cos nω t the conversion efficiency as lower charges are necessary to turn
LO LO (4)
n =1 them on and off[7].
sin nπ / 2
An = (5)
nπ / 2
It can be seen that the square-wave signal is composed
of odd harmonics of LO.
The output of the transconductance is:
2is = g m vRF cos ωRF t (6)
The differential pairs M5~M6's transconductance gm:
gm = gm5 = gm 6 (7)
So the output current of double-balanced mixer is:
∞
sin nπ / 2
I 0 = g m v RF ¦ [cos(nωLO + ωRF )t + (8)
n =1 nπ / 2
cos(nωLO − ωRF )t ] Figure 2(a). Schematic diagram of conventional single-balanced mixer.
The output current is then converted into voltage signal or Figure 2(b). Schematic diagram of single-balanced mixer with current
bleeding
power signal by the load, and generally the load is linear, so the
output of double-balanced mixer is only composed of the odd
harmonics of LO. C. Design of the RF buffer
Compared with other mixers, double-balanced mixer’s The resistor R3 can improve the performance of input
output spectrum has fewer glitches. IP3,but when the resistor is big enough ,the conversion gain of
Base-band signal and the input of the LO signal and the mixer will below 0dB.The RF signal of up-conversion mixer
sum and difference frequency signals are required, other need drive the filter off-chip, so it is necessary to add a buffer
components are interference. circuit to improve the drive capability of RF signal. The
From formula (8), when LO is strong enough, the double- proposed circuit is shown in Fig.3.This buffer have to supply
balanced mixer conversion voltage gain is: some gain to make the conversion gain of mixer better from
2 1.8GHz to 2.6GHz and the output should match to 50 ¡ .The
Gv = g m RL (9) output will connect to the pad ,then to the filter off-chip,
π
therefore, The level of linearity of this amplifier also directly
RL is the impedance value of the load.
affect the entire up-conversion mixer.

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 The buffer circuit is designed as a tuned amplifier which
can work all of the band. The resistor of R is designed at 45
¡,which make the output return loss below -18dB.

Figure 5. The RF output return loss

Figure 3. The buffer circuit
III. LAYOUT AND SIMULATION RESULTS
The proposed up-conversion mixer was designed in TSMC
0.13ȝm RF CMOS process technology. Fig.4 shows the
photograph of the up-conversion mixer layout. Each bias circuit
together with the buffer circuit are integrated in the circuit, and
the chip size is 0.82 h 0.7mm2 .The layout structure is
symmetrical. Left is input LO signal and right is input base band
signal, down is output.
The circuit is simulated in Cadence SpectreRF[8]. The
mixer simulation conditions were set as below: the input base
band signal was -30dBm, the LO signal was-3dBm and the
process corner was TT. The temperature was 27°C. Fig. 5 shows
the post-simulated RF output return loss larger than 18 dB. The
mixer achieves more than 1.1dB of conversion gain all of the
base band signal from 10MHz to 400MHz in Fig 6. The
simulated input IP3 is 6.45 dBm at 1.8GHz in Fig 7 and 8.46 Figure 6. The conversion gain
dBm in Fig. 8.

Figure 4. Layout of up-conversion mixer Figure 7. The simulated input IP3 at 1.8GHz

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 REFERENCES
[1] Mei-Ling Yeh,Sheng-Hing Kuo,Wan-Rone Liou, “A Low Voltage 5GHz
Quadrature Up-Conversion Mixer for Wireless Transmitter,” International
Conference on Communications, Circuits and Systems, 2006.
[2] Fan Xiangning, Zhang Lei, “A 2.4-GHz CMOS up-conversion mixer for
WSN SoC applications,” 9th International Symposium on Communications
and Information Technology, 2009..
[3] Li Zhiqun, Wang Zhigong, Radio Frequency Integrated Circuits and
System, 2008.
[4] S. H-L. Tu, S. C-H. Chen, “A 5.26-GHz CMOS Up-Conversion Mixer for
IEEE 802.1 1a WLAN,” IEEE International Conference on Circuits and
Systems for Communication, 2008, pp. 820-823.
[5] Chi Baoyong, et al Ed, “Analysis and Design of CMOS RFICs, ” Tsinghua
University Press, 2006.
[6] MacEACHERN, L.A., and MANKU, T “A charge-injection method for
Gilbert cell biasing”. IEEE Canadian Conf. Electrical and Computer
Engineering, 1998, pp. 365-368
[7] S.-G. Lee and J.-K Choi, "Current-reuse bleeding mixer," IEEE Electronics
Figure 8. The simulated input IP3 at 2.5GHz Letters, Vol.36, No.8, 13 April 2000, pp.696 - 697.
[8] Cadence “Mixer Design Using SpectreRF,” Product Version 6.0 November.
2005.

TABLE I. SIMULATION RESULTS SUMARY

Parameter Simulation Result
RF Frequency(GHz) 1.8-2.6
Conversion Gain(dB) >1.1
Input IP3(dBm) >6.45
Voltage Supply(V) 1.2
Current(Gilbert cell)(mA) 10

IV. CONCLUSION
In this paper a Gilbert-type up-conversion mixer circuit has
been presented using TSMC 0.13ȝm RF CMOS process. The
performance of the Gilbert up-conversion mixer at an RF output
frequency from 1.8 GHz to 2.6GHz is summarized in Table I.
The current bleeding technology and the buffer circuit is used to
improve the conversion gain and the input IP3.The post-layout
simulation results have shown that the proposed mixer is suitable
for the applications of high linearity and low power CMOS UWB
transmitters.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This work is supported by the National Science and
Technology Major Special Project (No.2009ZX03007-001 and
2012ZX03001019).

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