2 – 13GHz broadband CMOS low voltage mixer with active balun designed for UWB systems

This paper presents a 2 – 13GHz low-voltage broadband down-conversion mixer with an active balun for UWB radio. The mixer with an active balun is fabricated in the 0.18 µm 1P6M standard CMOS process. The mixer with active balun consumes 15.2 mW from a 1.2 V supply. This mixer was achieved by using a folded-mixer and a peaking inductor technique. This technique can double the 3 dB bandwidth at the output stage, so the high-frequency poles of the mixer could be pushed outside of the 2 – 13 GHz band range. The broadband mixer with an active balun achieves a conversion gain of 21 ± 0.6 dB and 14.9 ∼ 16.5 dB on a double-sideband (DSB) noise figure and the input return loss is −12 dB. The output return loss is −10 dB. An input third-order intercept point (IIP3) of −1.89 ∼ −1.8 dBm. The mixer with active balun achieves with a supply voltage of 1.2 V and with a power consumption of 18.3 mW.