Double-balanced 130–180 GHz passive and balanced 145–165 GHz active mixers in 45 nm CMOS

This paper presents wideband passive and active mixers in the 100-200 GHz range. The mixers are built using a 45nm CMOS SOI process with an ft of 220 GHz when referenced to the top metal layer. The passive double-balanced mixer results in a conversion loss of 12-13 dB from 130-180 GHz (including balun, transmission line and GSG pad losses) and achieves optimal performance with 3 dBm of LO power (referenced to the GSG LO pads). The active mixer achieves a conversion loss of 4.5 dB with a 3-dB bandwidth of 145-165 GHz, and consumes only 10 mW of DC power from a 1.5 V supply. The application areas are in wideband Gbps communications, imaging arrays with large IF bandwidths, and mm-wave spectrometers. To our knowledge, this work represents the first demonstration of high performance CMOS mixers in the 130-180 GHz frequency range.