Design of an Ultra Compact Low Power 60 GHz Frequency Doubler in 22 nm FD-SOI

Abstract

This paper presents the design and characterization of a 60 GHz differential frequency doubler fabricated in a 22nm FD-SOI CMOS technology. The push-push amplifiers are driven by quadrature differential input signals, generated by a two-stage polyphase filter. To compensate for the inherent losses of the polyphase filter a set of two-stage CMOS inverters is implemented. Integrated into a very compact area of $202\mu\mathrm{m}\times 164\mu\mathrm{m}=0.033 \ \text{mm}^{2}$, the proposed design has achieved −11 dBm output power and −10 dB conversion gain with an output −3 dB bandwidth over 16 GHz. While operating at its saturated output power, the circuit only consumes 8 mW of DC power from a 0.8 V supply, which is to the best knowledge of the authors the lowest reported for active mm-wave frequency doublers, and provides 35 dB of suppression of the fundamental achieved around the center frequency. By increasing the supply voltage to 1V, the conversion gain and output power can be improved to −5.7dB and −8.2dBm at a cost of 16mW of DC power.