A transmitter front-end design for 5GHz WLAN applications

Up-conversion mixer and driver amplifier for 802.11a wireless LAN application are designed and fabricated on 0.18 CMOS technology. The proposed up-conversion mixer adopts source degeneration transconductance stage to control the conversion gain, and driver amplifier uses cascode topology to control the gain and linearity. The fabricated up-mixer shows -6 /spl sim/ 10 dB of conversion gain and -18.5 dBm of OP/sub -1dB/ at 10 dB gain, and the driver amplifier shows -8 /spl sim/8 dB of power gain and 2 dBm of OP/sub -1dB/ at 6 dB gain. The up-mixer and the driver amplifier consume 12mA and 9mA from 1.8 V supply, respectively.