5–6 GHz 9.4 mW CMOS direct-conversion passive-mixer receiver with low-flicker-noise corner

This paper demonstrates a low-power and low-flicker-noise direct-conversion receiver using double-balanced passive mixer. The deep-n-well vertical-NPN bipolar junction transistor is placed as at the input stage of the IF amplifier to reduce the flicker noise in the 0.18 um standard CMOS process. As a result, conversion gain achieves 50-dB gain when the LO power is 10 dBm and the noise figure is 7-dB at 100 kHz. The totally power consumption is 9.4 mW at 1.8 V voltage supply.