A 19-32.8 GHz Low Power Down-Conversion Mixer with 8.2 dBm IP1dB for 5G Communication

This paper presents a 19-32.8 GHz high linearity and low power down-conversion mixer for 5G communications. To improve the linearity, the proposed mixer addresses the nonlinearity from RF and IF domains, which correspond to the transconductance (gm) stage and the IF buffer stage. A passive transformer is utilized as the gm stage, which enormously benefits to the linearity and wideband RF impedance matching. The IF buffer stage consists of a common-gate (CG) path and a cascode path to enhance the IF linearity. Furthermore, a current-reuse technique merging the IF stage with the mixer core is introduced to reduce the power consumption. Fabricated in a 65-nm SOI process, the mixer realizes a peak gain of -0.5 dB at 25.4 GHz with a 3-dB RF bandwidth of 13.8 GHz from 19 to 32.8 GHz. The measured 3-dB IF bandwidth is from 3.2 to 8 GHz. With the dc power of 15.2 mW, the mixer achieves an extremely high input 1-dB compression point (IP1dB) of 8.2 dBm at 25.4 GHz, which can support the 5G millimeter wave (mmWave) massive phase-array system.