Design of the CMOS Wideband Mixers for Microwave and Millimeter-wave Applications

Over the last years, the speed gap between leading-edge III/V and CMOS process has been significantly decreased. Many of millimeter-wave circuits have been demonstrated using sub-micron CMOS process. The goal of this thesis is to design and implement wideband mixers using advanced CMOS process for millimeter-wave applications.
The first part of this thesis consists of the mixers topology and evaluation parameters. In this part, passive and active mixers topology will be introduced. Then the commonly used parameters of mixers evaluation are also explained. Follow are the design and implementation of a passive distributed drain mixer using commercial 0.13-um CMOS technologies. This mixer achieves a wide and flat conversion gain of -5.5 ± 1 dB from 0.8 to 77.5 GHz. To best of our knowledge, this is first passive distributed drain-pumped topology proposed in CMOS process. It also demonstrates ultra-broadband characteristic. The mixer consumes zero DC power consumption with a compact size of 0.67 × 0.58 mm2 and operation bandwidth of 76.7 GHz.
A sub-harmonic Gilbert-cell mixer using 90-nm CMOS technologies is also presented in this thesis. This mixer exhibits a flat conversion gain of -1.5 ± 1.5 dB from 30 to 100 GHz. The total dc power consumption of this mixer is equal to 58.3 mW with a compact size of 0.61 × 0.58 mm2. The operation bandwidths of both wideband mixers are over 70 GHz. With the characteristics of CMOS process, the wideband mixers presented in this thesis are suitable for low-cost and high-integrated millimeter-wave system application.