24-40 GHz mmWave Down-Conversion Mixer With Broadband Capacitor-Tuned Coupled Resonators for 5G New Radio Cellular Applications

• Published in: IEEE access Vol. 10; pp. 16782 - 16792
• Main Authors: Lee, Donggu, Lee, Myunghun, Park, Beomyu, Song, Eunju, Lee, Kyudo, Lee, Jeongwoo, Han, Junghwan, Kwon, Kuduck
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Piscataway IEEE 2022; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: 5G mobile communication; Bandwidths; Broadband; Broadband communication; Buffers; capacitor-tuned; Capacitors; cellular; Cellular radio; Conversion; coupled resonator; down-conversion mixer; dual-band; Electric potential; Equalization; Frequency ranges; frequency range~2 (FR2); g<italic xmlns:ali="http://www.niso.org/schemas/ali/1.0/" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">ₘ -boosted; Gain; gain equalization; LO~buffer; Millimeter waves; millimeter-wave (mmWave); Mixers; new radio (NR); Radio frequency; Resonant frequency; Resonators; Third order intercept point; Transformers; Voltage
• ISSN: 2169-3536; 2169-3536
• DOI: 10.1109/ACCESS.2022.3149311

In this paper, a 24-40 GHz broadband millimeter-wave (mmWave) down-conversion double-balanced mixer with a dual-band local oscillator (LO) buffer employing RF and IF coupled resonators is presented for 5G new radio (NR) frequency range 2 (FR2) cellular applications. The proposed mixer comprises a transformer-coupled <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">g_{m} </tex-math></inline-formula>-boosted common-gate (CG) <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">G_{m} </tex-math></inline-formula>-stage, a single-to-differential current-to-current RF capacitor-tuned coupled resonator, active switching stages with dual-band three-stage LO buffers, a current-to-voltage IF coupled resonator with gain equalization, and a wideband IF buffer with a transformer-based balun. The transformer-coupled <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">g_{m} </tex-math></inline-formula>-boosted CG <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">G_{m} </tex-math></inline-formula>-stage improves the NF and provides broadband input power matching. RF and IF coupled resonators enable an RF operating frequency range of 24-40 GHz and IF 1 dB bandwidth of more than 0.8 GHz, respectively. The implemented mixer was fabricated using a 40 nm CMOS process and characterized primarily in the 5G NR FR2 bands. The active die area was 0.654 mm 2 , and the mixer drew a bias current of 16 mA from a nominal supply voltage of 1.1 V. The mixer exhibited an RF operating frequency range of 24-40 GHz, noise figure of 12.4 dB, conversion gain of 1.2 dB, IF 1 dB bandwidth of 1.1 GHz, and output-referred third-order intercept point of 6.8 dBm.