A Millimeter-Wave CMOS Heterodyne Receiver With On-Chip LO and Divider

A heterodyne receiver performs frequency down-conversion in two steps to relax oscillator and divider speed requirements. The receiver incorporates new concepts such as a current-domain quadrature separation method, a broadband Miller divider based on a passive mixer, and an inductor nesting technique that significantly reduces the length of high-frequency interconnects. Fabricated in 90-nm CMOS technology, the circuit achieves a noise figure of 6.9 to 8.3 dB from 49 GHz to 53 GHz with a gain of 26 to 31.5 dB and I/Q mismatch of 1.6 dB/6.5deg.