A high linearity up-conversion mixer with IMD3 cancellation and gm3-boosting for 802.11a application

A high linearity up-conversion mixer using TSMC 0.18μm CMOS technology for IEEE 802.11a application is proposed in this paper. The g_m-boosting and derivative superposition(DS) techniques are employed to improve conversion gain and linearity of the designed mixer, respectively. The DS method adds the auxiliary transistors to cancel the third-order derivatives ((g_m)₃) of drain currents from the main transistors. Measurement results of the proposed up-conversion mixer exhibits the conversion gain of 6.5dB and IIP₃ of 0.2dBm while consuming 6.25mW from a 1.5V supply voltage. The chip size including pads is 1.15×1.1mm².