Design of Wideband Active Mixer by using an Active Inductor

A 1–10 GHz, radio frequency (RF) mixer with an active inductor (AI) designed in 0.18 μm Technology has been proposed in the paper. It uses a conventional single-balanced mixer and double-balanced mixer for demonstrating wideband performance without using an inductor. The AI-based single-balanced mixer achieves conversion gain (CG) of 6–3 dB, S11 of -12 dB, and the third-order input intercept point (IIP3) of 0.15-2 dBm. Moreover, the active transformer that is designed based on the proposed AI is used in the Gilbert cell mixer for improving the bandwidth (BW). The proposed AI-based Gilbert cell mixer achieves 4.5-3 dB of CG, and 2.7-3.8 dBm of IIP3. The 3-dB BWs of the proposed mixers are 1–10 GHz.