An ultra-low power self-oscillating mixer for WSN applications

An ultra-low power (ULP) self-oscillating mixer (SOM) using moderate inversion operation is presented. It consists in a voltage controlled oscillator (VCO) stacked on a single balanced current commuting mixer which is led by an RF transconductor stage. The measurement results show that the proposed SOM exhibit a minimum SSB noise figure of 17.5 dB and a voltage conversion gain of 10 dB. The input P1dB compression point is -20.5 dBm. Operating under 1 V supply, the chip has a power consumption of 600 μW and an occupying area of 1.2 mm² including pads.