60GHz Double-balanced drain-pumped up-conversion mixer using 90nm CMOS

A new type of drain-pumped mixer is proposed for a 60 GHz direct up-conversion using a standard 90nm CMOS process in this paper. Because no stacks are needed for the architecture, a high conversion gain (CG) thanks to high trans-conductance (gm) can be achieved while consuming low power. By configuring a balanced architecture for LO-to-RF isolation, the proposed mixer demonstrates CG of -5.1dB with a reasonable 0dBm LO power while maintaining low power dissipation of 16.3mW. Its LO-to-RF isolation is better than 30dB and size is only 0.35mm².