A 60 GHz Down-Conversion Mixer featuring Energy-saving Standby-Mode in 22 nm FD-SOI

This paper presents a 60 GHz switchable down-conversion mixer implemented in a 22 nm Fully-Depleted-Silicon-On-Insulator (FD-SOI) technology. The mixer consists of an local oscillator (LO) single-ended to differential (S2D) driver and a Gilbert cell based mixer core with baseband buffers. Thanks to the LO S2D driver, the mixer only requires a minimum LO power of −15 dBm for operation. The measured peak conversion gain is 8 dB. Including the LO driver and baseband buffers, the total DC power is 23 mW. The circuit core consumes 0.11 mm
²
of area. Compared to the state-of-the-art mixers at 60 GHz, the circuit shows the highest bandwidth and gain, and the lowest LO power. Furthermore, to the author’ best knowledge, this is the first investigation of a 60 GHz down-conversion mixer regarding fast switching between active and standby-mode using the back-gate for the mixer core avoiding the critical transistor breakdown problem induced by the switching.