Design of Millimetre-Wave Passive Mixer in 45-nm SOI CMOS Technology

Design of a millimetre-wave passive mixer in 45nm SOI CMOS technology is presented in this work. To balance the conversion loss of the mixer with linearity, bias conditions are carefully selected. Moreover, transformer baluns are used to convert single-ended signal to differential ones for both LO and RF ports. Based on the electromagnetic simulations, the designed mixer has a return loss better than -10 dB for the RF port, and the conversion loss of the designed mixer is 10 dB, while a 14-dBm LO power is used. Meanwhile, under the same LO power, the P1dB of the designed mixer is 10 dBm. The overall size of the designed mixer with all RF and DC pads is only $0.95 \times 0.6$ mm$^{\mathbf{2}}$.