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IEEE JOURNAL OF SOLID-STATE CIRCUITS, VOL. 40, NO. 12, DECEMBER 2005

A Noise Cancellation Technique in Active RF-CMOS Mixers

Hooman Darabi, Senior Member, IEEE, and Janice Chiu
AbstractBased on the physical understanding of noise mechanisms in active mixers, a noise cancellation technique to reduce the icker noise contribution of the switches in a Gilbert-type mixer is presented. For the proof of concept, a prototype double-balanced mixer in 0.13 m CMOS is fabricated. The circuit achieves a icker noise corner of almost an order of magnitude lower than that of a standard implementation, without any penalty in the linearity, gain, or power consumption. Index TermsCMOS, direct conversion, icker noise, GSM, linearity, low IF, mixer, narrowband, receiver, white noise.

I. INTRODUCTION

double-balanced Gilbert-type mixer is widely used as the downconverter in CMOS receivers, since it provides a high impedance input to the low-noise amplier, yet is capable of driving a low impedance load at its output. However, due to its relatively high noise gure, it often limits the receiver noise performance. Specically, since the switches are biased at a nonzero drain current, they contribute icker noise to the output [1], [2]. There are important repercussions in a direct-conversion receiver, where the signal downconverts to baseband after only minimal amplication at RF. In narrowband applications such as paging or GSM, the mixer noise is very likely to overwhelm the downconverted signal, and as a consequence, limits the overall receiver noise gure. In this paper, a noise cancellation technique to improve the icker noise contribution of the switches in active mixers is prenoise sented. The idea is based on physical understanding of mechanisms in the mixers, and is validated by measurements. In Section II, the basic processes resulting in switches icker noise contribution is explained. In Section III, the new scheme for noise improvement is introduced, and Section IV presents the implementation and experimental results. II. GILBERT MIXER FLICKER NOISE SOURCES noise mechanisms in active A physical understanding of mixers is crucial to identify and eliminate the noise sources. A prototype double-balanced mixer is shown in Fig. 1 which comprises an input transconductance stage, switches, and an output load. Noise is present in all the transistors making up these functions. The noise of the transconductance stage accompanies the RF input signal, and is translated in frequency domain just like the signal is. Thus, in a zero-IF receiver, the input FETs
Manuscript received April 26, 2005; revised July 15, 2005. The authors are with Broadcom Corporation, Irvine, CA 92618 USA (e-mail: hdarabi@broadcom.com). Digital Object Identier 10.1109/JSSC.2005.857428

Fig. 1.

Prototype double-balanced mixer.

only contribute white noise to the output. Nonetheless, the mismatches in the switching quad result in a small amount of icker noise leaking to the output, and must be avoided by a proper layout. The noise of the load stage directly competes with the downconverted signal, and it may be lowered in one of many ways. The active load devices may be sized properly, or at the expense of some voltage headroom, mixer may be loaded by noise. On the other hand, poly resistors which are free of noise of the switches appears at the output without a frequency translation. Consider a double-balanced mixer where in the absence of the RF input the transconductance stage is replaced by current sources [Fig. 2(a)]. Although the mixer is a time-variant nonlinear system, the noise transfer function from each of the devices to the output is linear. Since the noise of the switching transistors are uncorrelated, the super-position theory holds. As a result, the noise in switches is taken into account by a low-frequency voltage source at the input of one of the switches [ in Fig. 2(a)]. Since the mixer is driven by a large sine-wave LO signal, the actual voltage switching the differential pair consists of a sine-wave LO with a noisy base line determined by icker noise of switches. Therefore, the switching event is advanced or dened by the switches noise magretarded by an amount of nitude ( in Fig. 2(a)). This results in a pulse train of random at a frequency of twice widths , and a xed amplitude of the LO frequency [Fig. 2(b)], where is the bias current of each pair, and is given as (1)

0018-9200/$20.00 2005 IEEE

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Fig. 2.

(a) Mixer with switches 1=f noise at the LO input. (b) Noise pulses resulting in 1=f noise at mixer output.

Fig. 3. Mixer output spectrum due to switches icker noise.

In (1), represents the equivalent icker noise of the is the slope of the LO signal at the switching quad, and switching instant. The icker component of the output noise current which is DC average of the pulses in Fig. 1(b) is shown as follows, where is the LO period: (2) Since the noise pulses have a frequency of twice the LO frequency, the mixer output spectrum consists of a DC term as well as components at the LO even harmonics (Fig. 3). The output icker noise current is the DC average of pulses as shown in (2). In a commutating mixer where a large LO amplitude is applied, the low-frequency noise of the switches slowly modulates the zero-crossings of each switching pair [1]. III. MIXER FLICKER NOISE IMPROVEMENT Fig. 2 suggests that one way of lowering the mixer icker noise is reducing the width of the noise pulses. This requires increasing the slope of the LO signal normalized to its frequency in (2)], or reducing the icker noise component of the [ switching FETs [ in (2)]. The latter is not a viable solution, since it requires increasing the size of the switches. However, the mixer switches need to be fast, and should not excessively load the LO buffer. In addition, this increases the parasitic capacitance at the common source of the switches, resulting in noise indirect translation to the output [1]. On the other hand, the LO amplitude is limited to the supply voltage, and increasing its slope at high frequency directly relates to higher power consumption in the LO buffers.

Fig. 4. Gilbert mixer with conventional xed current injection to improve switches 1=f noise.

noise is improved if the height Alternatively, the mixer of the noise pulses is decreased. This could be only accomplished by reducing the bias current of the mixer switches, as . Conventionally, as the height of the pulses is equal to shown in Fig. 4, injecting a xed current to the switches lowers the effective current commutated by them [3]. This reduces the height of the noise pulses, and as a result lowers the switches icker noise. However, this technique suffers from a few important drawbacks. First, reducing the bias current of the switches in Fig. 4), raises the impedance seen at the their source ( allowing more RF current to be shunted by the parasitic capacitance at the that node. This reduces the mixer bandwidth and degrades its linearity. Second, the white noise of the current source adds to that of the transconductance stage, increasing the mixer white noise gure. Although the latter issue is alleviated by implementing a current reuse scheme as described in [4], the other concerns still remain. For these reasons, the ratio of the injected xed current to the mixer bias current is usually kept small, imnoise by only a small amount. proving the switches Since the noise pulses are only present at the switching instant of the LO differential pairs [Fig. 2(a)], what is proposed here is injecting a dynamic current equal to the bias current of each pair at only the switching event. This is sufcient to eliminate the output icker noise component completely. This new is idea is illustrated in Fig. 5(a), where the current source injected at only the switching instant through a control circuit.

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Fig. 5. (a) The new idea of dynamic current injection. (b) Corresponding waveforms.

The switching event is estimated through monitoring the voltage at the common source of each pair [nodes A and B in Fig. 5(a)]. Since the LO amplitude is large, each switching pair resembles a full-wave rectier, creating a voltage waveform as shown in Fig. 5(b) at nodes A and B. The switching occurs when this voltage is at its minimum, and that is when the current is injected. This effectively reduces the height of the noise pulses at the output to zero as shown in Fig. 5(b), and eliminates the icker noise component. Otherwise, no current is injected and the mixer operates normally. Contrary to the traditional xed current injection method (Fig. 4), in this new scheme, the dynamically injected current does not add its own white noise, since it is only ON at the switching event, when the LO differential pair is balanced. Thus, noise of the current source appears as a common-mode term at the output. Similarly, the mixer bandwidth is not degraded, and neither is its linearity, as the switches input impedance remains the same over the period of time the RF current ows through switches to the mixer output. IV. NEW MIXER IMPLEMENTATION AND EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS To prove this concept, the circuit shown in Fig. 6 is fabricated and measured. Grounded source FETs - are used as the transconductance stage for better linearity. The mixer is loaded by polysilicon resistors - which are free of icker noise. The dynamic injection circuit is implemented through pMOS switches - whose gates are connected to the common source of the mixer switching pairs. The current source is chosen lower, but close to the mixer bias current . At the LO zero-crossings, the gate voltage of the pMOS devices goes down. Therefore, the pMOS switches turn ON, injecting the to the switching pairs. Otherwise, the pMOS gate current voltage is high, and the injected current is zero. The pMOS devices, - , must be sized properly to turn ON and OFF at each zero-crossing, yet do not add signicant parasitic capacitance at the common source of the switches. Since the injection P-FETs essentially eliminate the switches icker

Fig. 6. Circuit implementation of the new mixer with dynamic current injection.

noise, the actual switches may sized smaller to further lower the parasitic at their common source. The DC level of the LO signal is chosen such that the current remains OFF during the normal operation, and it source only turns ON at the zero-crossings. Since the LO amplitude is large, the current injection circuitry is not sensitive to process or voltage variation. The large LO drive ensures that at every zero-crossing, the voltage at the common source of the switches . The current source could is low enough to turn ON be biased with bandgap to avoid any process variation. Note that even in the presence of imperfect switching, still more than an order of magnitude improvement is achievable. Fig. 7 shows the mixer simulated and measured double-sideband (DSB) noise gure over the output frequency range of 10 kHz to 10 MHz. For the reference, the noise gure of the same mixer, but without the injection circuitry is measured as well. As expected, both mixers have the same white noise gure of about 11 dB. However, the mixer with injection has a corner of about 10 kHz, whereas that of the original one is noise corner frequency is dened as about 90 kHz. The

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Fig. 7.

Mixer DSB noise gure with and without improvement.

Fig. 9. Mixer die microphotograph.

TABLE I SUMMARY OF MIXER PERFORMANCE

V. CONCLUSION A new noise cancellation technique based on the physical understanding of icker noise mechanisms in a Gilbert mixer is presented. The method is based on dynamic current injection to the switching quad at only the LO zero-crossings. This leads to noise reduction in the mixer by an order of magnitude, a without degradation in the mixer other parameters such as linearity, power dissipation, or bandwidth. Table I summarizes the simulations and measurement results of the new mixer, as well noise as the one without the injection current. Except for the gure, the two mixers have a very similar performance, indicating that this technique improves the mixer icker noise by almost an order of magnitude at virtually no cost. REFERENCES
[1] H. Darabi and A. A. Abidi, Noise in RF-CMOS mixers: a simple physical model, IEEE J. Solid-State Circuits, vol. 35, no. 1, pp. 1525, Jan. 2000. [2] M. T. Terrovitis and R. G. Meyer, Noise in current-commutating CMOS mixers, IEEE J. Solid-State Circuits, vol. 34, no. 6, pp. 772783, Jun. 1999. [3] W. M. C. Sansen and R. G. Meyer, Distortion in bipolar transistor variable-gain ampliers, IEEE J. Solid-State Circuits, vol. 8, no. 4, pp. 275282, Apr. 1973.

Fig. 8. Mixer measured IIP3.

the frequency where the icker and white noise components intersect. The mixer measurements agree fairly well with the SPECTRE-RF simulation results. The mixer measured IIP3 is 10.5 dBm, and is shown in Fig. 8. The third-order nonlinearity is mainly limited by the transconductance stage, with a few dB contribution forming the switching pair at 2 GHz. The measured voltage gain which is the slope of the main tone curve is about 0.5 dB. In all the measurements, an LO signal at 2 GHz through on-chip buffers is fed to the mixers. The mixer voltage gain and noise gure stays relatively at up to 2 GHz. The mixer is fabricated in TSMC 0.13 m one-poly six-metal CMOS technology. A microphotograph of the device is shown in Fig. 9. Under nominal conditions, the mixer core consumes a current of 2 mA from a 1.2-V supply. It occupies an area of m , of which only about 5% is taken by the current injection block. The circuit is operational over a temperature range of 20 C to 100 C.

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[4] D. Manstretta, M. Brandolini, and F. Svelto, Second-order intermodulation mechanisms in CMOS downconverters, IEEE J. Solid-State Circuits, vol. 38, no. 3, pp. 394406, Mar. 2003.

Hooman Darabi (S98M99SM05) received the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1999. He is currently a Senior Manager with Broadcom Corporation, Irvine, CA. His interests include analog and RF IC design for wireless communications.

Janice Chiu was born in Seattle, WA, in 1974. She received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan, R.O.C., in 1997, and the M.S. degree in electrical engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1999. From 1999 to 2000, she was with Raytheon Company working on high-speed analog-to-digital converters. Since 2000, she has been with Broadcom Corporation, Irvine, CA, as a Senior Staff Design Engineer. Her current research interests include RF and analog integrated circuit design for wireless communication systems.