The Design of Low LO-Power 60-GHz CMOS Quadrature-Balanced Self-Switching Current-Mode Mixer

This letter describes the analysis and measurement of a complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) quadrature-balanced current-mode mixer with a 90^deg branch-line hybrid coupler and self-switching current-mode devices. The proposed mixer, using 0.13 mum 1P8M CMOS technology, can downconvert a 60 GHz RF signal to a 2 GHz intermediate frequency (IF) signal, with a local-oscillator power of 0 dBm at 58 GHz. In the design, the mixer had a single-end conversion gain of 1 dB and an input-referred 1 dB compression point of 2 dBm. The LO-RF isolation of the mixer can achieve -37 dB while using 3 mA from a supply voltage of 1.2 V.