A High-Gain and Low-Noise Mixer with Hybrid $G_{m}$-Boosting for 5G FR2 Applications

This paper presents a hybrid transconductance (
$g_{m}$
) boosting technique exploiting both transformer coupling and cross-coupled PMOS pair to improve the conversion gain (CG) and noise figure (NF) of mm-wave mixers. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed
$g_{m}$
-boosting technique, a high-gain and low-noise mixer for 5G FR2 frequency band applications is developed in a 40 nm CMOS process. Transformer-based pole splitting and derivative superposition are employed to enhance the mixer bandwidth and improve linearity. The mixer achieves a peak CG of 20.9 dB, a 30% fractional bandwidth (
$f_{BW}$
), a minimum NF of 7.7 dB, and an input referred 1-dB compression point of −14 dBm, leading to an excellent figure of merit (FOM) of 11.05. The mixer consumes 15.6 mW of power and occupies a die area of 0.31 mm
²
.