A 3-V RF-CMOS dual-gate up-conversion mixer

Abstract

A dual-gate double-balanced mixer for an UHF-VHF avionics communication system is presented. The circuit is implemented in a standard 0.5 /spl mu/m CMOS process and is designed for avionics systems that require high dynamic range and high reliability. In this application, the mixer upconverts from VHF to 674 MHz with a conversion gain of 13.5 dB and a single side-band noise figure (SSB NF) of 3.2 dB. The double-balanced mixer consumes 45 mA of current at 3.3 volts resulting in an input referred IIP3 of +7.35 dBm. This low noise figure and high intercept point, is simultaneously achieved by design balance, and use of image and noise terminations on the input RF ports.