A 1V 2.4GHz Down Conversion Folded Mixer

Analysis and design of a 1.0-V CMOS mixer based on variable load technique

“…This is a serious issue in low-voltage mixer design. Though the conversion gain (CG) of the mixers in [4][5][6] is larger than that of this work, there are 3-5 inductors in these mixers which would increase their occupation area. This point also becomes important for low-cost chip fabrication even in more advanced CMOS process.…”

“…(3) The switches are biased at non-zero drain current, which contributes more flicker noise to the output and increases the mixer's noise figure. The linearity of the folded mixer in [5] is very low. Moreover, it consumes too large DC current, and the noise figure will be large for low RF signal level.…”

“…To reduce the supply voltages, some folded mixer architectures have been investigated in [2,5], they can work well with 1.0 V supply voltage. However, as mentioned in [1], for the folded mixer in [2]: (1) The peak-to-peak amplitude of LO signal is lower than supply voltages.…”

“…Insufficient voltage headroom results in some circuit topologies unable to satisfy the required specifications or even unable to operate. Hence, research for low-voltage circuit topologies is important [1][2][3][4][5][6][7].…”