A 27-44 GHz CMOS Dual-Ring Subharmonic Up-Conversion Mixer with Linearization Technique

A 27-44 GHz subharmonic up-conversion mixer using 65 nm CMOS technology is presented. For subharmonic scheme and wide RF/IF bandwidth, a dual-ring topology is developed in this mixer design. To increase the linearity and conversion gain (CG) without adding additional local oscillator (LO) power, a LO boosting linearization technique is adopted. The subharmonic up-conversion mixer achieves a measured CG of -12 dB ± 1.5 dB from a wide RF frequency of 27 to 44 GHz. The 3-dB IF bandwidth is from dc to 10 GHz. After adopting the linearization technique, the output 1-dB compression point (OP1 dB) of the subharmonic up-conversion mixer can be improved from -12 to -9 dBm at 38 GHz with zero addition dc consumption.