Low Flicker-Noise and Low Leakage Direct Conversion CMOS Mixer for 5GHz Application

H. Kanaya1, N. Koga, M. A. Abdelghany, R. K. Pokharel, and K. Yoshida

Graduate School of Information Science and Electrical Engineering Kyushu University 744, Motooka, Fukuoka, 819-0395, Japan 1 kanaya@ed.kyushu-u.ac.jp
Abstract This paper presents the design and measurement of low flicker-noise, high conversion gain double-balanced Gilbert cell mixer in CMOS process. Since the noise figure (NF) of the CMOS mixer is strongly affected by flicker noise (1/f noise), a dynamic current injection technique is used to reduce the flicker noise corner frequency. An inductor is employed to tune the tail capacitance in the local oscillator and the RF transconductance stages. So, it reduces the RF leakage through this parasitic capacitance. Moreover, output band elimination filter (BEF) is employed to suppress the leakage of the RF signal. The mixer is designed using TSMC 0.18 m CMOS process. Simulations and measurements had been performed. The proposed mixer has a simulated conversion gain of 15dB and single side band noise figure is 10.6dB at 20kHz. Index Terms CMOS mixer, Gilbert cell mixer, flicker-noise, band elimination filter.

II. MECHANISM OF THE FLICKER NOISE IN GILBERT CELL MIXER There are two major mechanisms that generate the flicker noise. One is the direct mechanism and another is indirect mechanism. Direct mechanism is due to the finite slope of the switching pair transitions. In order to decrease a flicker noise in the direct mechanism, the size of the switching pairs needs to be increased, however, large switching devices increase the parasitic capacitance of the switching pairs, resulting in the flicker noise translating to the output. The second, indirect mechanism is due to the tail capacitance at the node between the LO switches and RF transconductance stage [2]. In order to decrease the flicker noise in CMOS active mixers, the bias current of the LO switches should be small enough to lower the height of the noise pulses. The static current injection technique was proposed to reduce the bias current of the LO switches [4]. However, the impedance of the LO switches as seen from the RF stage is increased as we reduce the bias current of the LO switches. The dynamic current injection technique has also been proposed in [5-7] to suppress the flicker-noise. It injects a dynamic current totally equal to the bias current of the LO switches at only the LO switching event [3]. In addition, RF leakage current flows through the injection circuit, which decreases conversion gain and also allows more RF current to be shunted by the tail capacitance at the node between the LO switches and RF transconductance stage. The tail capacitance should be minimized to decrease the indirectly translated flicker noise [2]. To minimize the tail capacitance, a smaller device size is appropriate for the LO switches, which increases the flicker noise from direct mechanism. The parallel tuning inductor compensates the parasitic tail capacitance. III. MIXER DESIGN A. Design of proposed Gilbert cell mixer Fig. 1 shows the comparison of the circuit model of the proposed and static current injection Gilbert cell mixer, respectively. Both mixers have a tuning inductor. In order to reduce the direct and indirect flicker-noise generation, dynamic current injection technique using three PMOS switches near Vb and VDD [5,6], as shown in Fig.1 (a). These PMOS switches inject a dynamic current equal to the bias current of each pair of switches at only the switching event. Vb is used to control the height of the injected current pulses.

I. INTRODUCTION In recent years, development of the single chip transceivers to minimize cost, power dissipation and chip size are necessary for wireless communication systems. Direct conversion receiver (DCR) is one of the best candidates for low complexity, low power, and low cost single chip integration [1]. Unfortunately, all of these advantages come with the fact that the CMOS transistors suffer from a very high intrinsic flicker noise [2]. Linear RF circuits dont affected by the flicker noise, such as low noise amplifiers (LNA), since its operating frequency is much higher than the flicker noise corner frequency [3], but in the mixers, the case is different, because the flicker noise lies in the output band of the mixer, specially, low-IF and Zero-IF mixers. There are a lot of designs to reduce the output flicker noise of the mixer. Static current injection has been proposed in [4]. Dynamic current injection technique with a shunt tuning inductor has been designed in order to reduce the effect of tail capacitance at the node between the local oscillator (LO) switches and RF transconductance stage for 2.4GHz applications [5,6]. Also, in our previous study, differential active inductor is employed instead of the tuning spiral inductor in the Gilbert cell mixer for 5GHz application [7]. In this paper, we have proposed a mixer circuit composed of PMOS switches as current injecting circuit, inductor which is employed to tune the tail capacitance, and output band elimination filters (BEFs) which suppress the RF leakage. As a result, the flicker noise reduction occurred, at the same time, we can suppress the RF leakage. Simulation results verified that this design has good performances compared to other designs. Also, we fabricated and measured the proposed mixer by using 0.18 m CMOS process.

VDD

VDD

and third is the proposed Gilbert mixer with dynamic current injection.

Vb

Vb

Vb

(a)
LO+

LO+

LO-

LO+ LO+

LO-

RF+

RF-

RF+

RF-

tuning inductor

Fig. 1. Comparison of the circuit model of the dynamic (a) and static (b) current injection Gilbert cell mixer, respectively.

B. Design of out put band elimination filter (BEF) In order to suppress the leakage of the RF signal in the base band output port, two band elimination filter (BEF)s, which composed of ladder connection of inductors and capacitors, are connected on the both output ports (Out+ and Out-), respectively. Fig.2 shows the final circuit model of the proposed Gilbert cell mixer with output BEFs.
Out+ VDD Vb Out-

(b)

LO+

LO-

LO+

Band elimination filters

RF+ RF-

Fig. 3. Output power versus frequency of the proposed Gilbert cell mixer without (a) and with output BEF (b).
conventional With Static Current Injection With Dynamic Current Injection

Fig. 2. Circuit model of the dynamic current injection Gilbert cell mixer with BEFs.

IV. SIMURATION RESULTS The proposed mixer in Fig. 2 is designed by TSMC 0.18m 1P6M CMOS technology, and simulated by Cadence and Agilent tools. The input RF and LO frequencies are 5.2GHz and 5.1GHz, respectively, to obtain 100MHz base band frequency. Fig. 3 shows the output power versus frequency of the proposed Gilbert cell mixer without and with output BEFs. Output signal of proposed mixer at 5.1GHz is 28.4dB smaller than that of the mixer without BEFs. We can suppress the 5GHz-band signal, namely RF leakage, by using on chip BEF. Fig. 4 shows simulation results of the noise figure (NF) for three configurations of Gilbert mixer, one is the conventional mixer, second is the Gilbert-cell with static current injection,

Fig. 4. Simulation results of the noise figure (NF).

In Fig.4, the NF of the proposed mixer is about 10dB at 1MHz, which is similar to that of the conventional mixer. Also the flicker noise of the proposed mixer is better than

that of the static current injection mixer, and the proposed mixer has a 20KHz flicker corner frequency. Fig. 5 and Fig. 6 show the input third orders intercept point (IIP3) and input 1-dB compression point (P1dB) of the proposed mixer, respectively. The proposed mixer has IIP3 is -6.3dBm and P1dB is -14.2dBm.

can obtain the base band signal and peak-to-peak value is approximately 124mV.

+LO -LO Matching circuit +RF -RF

Output power [dBm]

BEF Out +
Input power [dBm]

BEF OutTuning inductor

Fig. 5. Input third orders intercept point of the proposed mixer.

Fig. 7. Micrograph of the proposed Gilbert cell mixer.

Output power [dBm]

Input power [dBm]

Fig. 6. Input 1-dB compression point of the proposed mixer.

Fig. 8. Comparison of the simulated and measured return loss.

V. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS Fig. 7 shows the micrograph of the proposed Gilbert cell mixer using TSMC 0.18m 1P6M CMOS technology. The total sizes with I/O pads is 1.1mm x 1.0mm. The matching circuit and tuning inductor are also shown. The input impedance of the RF is 50. Differential RF inputs and LO inputs are injected through the two GSG probes (Cascade microtech.), which have 150m pitch and 50 input impedance, and GSGSG probe (Cascade microtech.), which has 100m pitch and 50 input impedance, respectively. Also, output BEFs are shown near the output ports. Output base band signal can be obtained though the bonding wires. Fig. 8 shows the comparison of the measured and simulated input return loss, respectively. This matching circuit works at around 5GHz. The input RF and LO frequencies are 5.2GHz and 5.1GHz, respectively, to obtain 100MHz base band frequency. Fig. 9 shows the measured output signal of the proposed mixer. We

10ns/div

Fig. 9. Measured output waveform of the proposed mixer.

Table 1 shows a comparison of the proposed mixer with the conventional mixer, the mixer with static current injection, and the mixer with dynamic current injection. It shows that

the proposed mixer using dynamic current injection, inductor and BEF has a good performance, specially, with a high conversion gain and suppression of the flicker noise at 20KHz. Power consumption is the same as other mixers. Table 1. Performance comparison of the proposed mixer (simulation).
Direct current injection and BEF Convesion gain [dB] NF at 20kHz [dB] P1dB[dBm] IIP3[dBm] Power consumption [mW] 15 10.6 -14.2 -6.3 10.8 Conv. Static current injection and BEF 13 12.1 -19.8 -10.1 10.8

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT This work was partly supported by a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research from JSPS (KAKENHI) and Fukuoka project in the Cooperative Link of Unique Science and Technology for Economy Revitalization (CLUSTER) from Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT). This work was also partly supported by VLSI Design and Education Center (VDEC), the University of Tokyo in collaboration with CADENCE Corporation and Agilent Corporation. REFERENCES
[1] H. Darabi, and A. A. Abidi, Noise in RF-CMOS mixers: A simple physical model, IEEE Trans. Solid State Circuits, vol.35, no.1, pp.15-25, Jan.2000. [2] J. Park, C. H. Lee, B. S, Kim, and J. Laskar, Design and analysis of low flicker-noise CMOS mixers for directconversion receivers, IEEE Trans Microwave Theory and Techniques, vol.54, no. 12, pp. 4372-4379, 2006. [3] T. Melly, A. Porret, Christian C. Enz, and Eric A. Vittoz,An analysis of flicker noise rejection in low-power and low voltage CMOS mixers, IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits, vol.36, no.1, pp.102109, January 2001. [4] Z. Zhang, Z. Chen and J. Lau, A 900MHz CMOS balanced harmonic mixer for direct conversion receivers, 2000 IEEE Radio and Wireless Conference (RAWCON), pp. 219-222, September 2000. [5] H. Darabi, and J. Chiu, A noise cancellation technique in active-RF CMOS mixers, IEEE J. Solid State Circuits, vol.40, no.12, pp.2628-2632, Dec. 2005. [6] J.Yoon, H. Kim, C. Park, J.Yang, H. Song, S. Lee, and B. Kim, A new RF CMOS Gilbert mixer with improved noise figure and linearity, IEEE Trans Microwave Theory and Techniques, vol.56, no. 3, pp. 626-631, 2008. [7] M. A. Abdelghany, R. K. Pokharel, H. Kanaya, and K. Yoshida, A Low Flicker-Noise High Conversion Gain RF-CMOS Mixer with Differential Active Inductor, Proc. 2009 KoreaJapan Micro Wave Conference, pp. 141-144, 2009.

6.8 21.4 -11.8 -3.0 10.8

VI. CONCLUSION A Gilbert cell mixer using dynamic current injection, inductor and output BEFs has been proposed and measured. The proposed mixer is fabricated using TSMC 0.18m 1P6M CMOS technology, so that, the mixer operates under 1.8v supply voltage. We can minimize the flicker noise sources and RF leakage. The mixer has a 10dB NF at 1MHz, 10.6dB at 20KHz and 15dB conversion gain, respectively. Also, it has a 1-dB compression point of 14.2dBm, and IIP3 of 6.3dBm.