N-Path Mixers Beyond CMOS

N-path mixers, while long known, have seen rapid growth in popularity with the advent of deeply scaled silicon CMOS. This popularity results from these mixers’ unusual filtering properties, extremely high out-of-band linearity, and surprisingly low noise. Here we discuss why scaled CMOS has been the primary technology used when implementing N -path mixers that enabling of these properties, and then how recent advances in circuit topologies allow these circuits to be mapped into other transistor technologies such as GaAs and GaN HEMTs or HBTs, with potentially superior performance.