Injection-locked superharmonic self-oscillating mixer

This paper presents an self-oscillating mixer (SOM) circuit using a superharmonic injection-locking technique. In this topology, the superharmonic injection-locked oscillator (ILO) is used as a frequency divide-by-two circuit. The prototype circuit is implemented using 65 nm CMOS technology. The experimental results exhibit a minimum noise figure (NF) of 5.6 dB, a gain of 14.5 dB, input P1dB of -11 dBm and a phase-noise of -125 dBc/Hz at the 300 kHz offset frequency from the 4.1 GHz local oscillator (LO) frequency. The circuit draws 4 mA from a 1.2-supply voltage.