A 60-GHz down-converting CMOS single-gate mixer

A quadrature balanced single-gate CMOS mixer, designed to exploit the unlicensed band around 60-GHz, is presented. Also a millimeter-wave (mm-wave) modeling methodology is discussed which is suitable for the design of CMOS mm-wave active mixers. The performance of a fully-integrated mixer fabricated on a standard digital 130-nm CMOS process is given and compared to the simulations. At a radio frequency (RF) of 60 GHz, intermediate frequency (IF) of 2 GHz, and low LO power of 0 dBm, conversion loss is better than 2 dB, and an input-referred 1-dB compression point of -3.5 dBm was measured.