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Design of a Low Voltage Highly Linear 2.4 GHz Up-Conversion Mixer in 0.18 μm CMOS Technology

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Abstract

This paper presents a low voltage highly linear up-conversion mixer for 2.4 GHz IEEE 802.11b WLAN transmitter applications based on a Chartered 0.18 μm CMOS technology. In the proposed mixer, the double balanced Gilbert cell topology was adopted and the dual resistive current-reuse and current-bleeding techniques in both the driver and switching stages with a capacitive cross-coupling technique were used. The up-conversion mixer can convert a 10 MHz intermediate frequency signal to a 2.4 GHz radio frequency signal, with a local oscillator power of 0 dBm at 2.39 GHz. A comparison with conventional CMOS mixer shows that this up-conversion mixer has advantages of low voltage, low power consumption and high performance. The post-layout simulation results demonstrate that at 2.4 GHz, the circuit provides 7.1 dB of conversion gain and the input-referred third-order intercept point of 11.3 dBm, while drawing only 5 mA for the mixer core under a supply voltage of 1.2 V. The chip area including testing pads is only 0.65 × 0.75 mm.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Information Science and Engineering, Hunan University, Changsha, 410082, Hunan, People’s Republic of China

    Qiuzhen Wan, Chunhua Wang & Jingru Sun

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  1. Qiuzhen Wan
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  2. Chunhua Wang
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  3. Jingru Sun
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Correspondence to Qiuzhen Wan.

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Wan, Q., Wang, C. & Sun, J. Design of a Low Voltage Highly Linear 2.4 GHz Up-Conversion Mixer in 0.18 μm CMOS Technology. Wireless Pers Commun 70, 57–68 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11277-012-0678-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11277-012-0678-3

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