A Reactive Passive Mixer for 16-QAM Cartesian IoT Transmitters in 22 nm FD-SOI CMOS

The use of a reactive passive mixer is proposed to implement an efficient Cartesian transmitter for IoT applications, capable of supporting high-order modulations, and high data rates. Prototypes in a 22 nm FD-SOI CMOS technology show a 5.5 dBm output-referred 1 dB compression point with 34.1% system efficiency in CW operation. Under a 2.4 Mbaud, 16-QAM modulation at 2.7 dBm average output power, they achieve 9.6 Mb/s data rate, EVM = −24.5 dB, ACLR = −32 dBc, and P
alt
= −36 dBm with 22% system efficiency.