A 8–30 GHz Passive Harmonic Rejection Mixer with 8 GHz Instantaneous IF Bandwidth in 45RFSOI

This work presents a passive harmonic rejection mixer which employs resistive scaling to maintain high linearity and to achieve 3rd and 5th harmonic rejection. The 8-phase 50% duty-cycle clocks are generated using polyphase filters without any clock dividers, and isolation between the 4 mixers is achieved using a Wilkinson network in the RF path. This enables the mixer to operate at mm-wave frequencies with wide instantaneous bandwidth, and greatly reduces the LO power consumption due to the much lower operating frequency of the LO network. The mixer is fabricated in the GlobalFoundries CMOS 45-RFSOI process and has a measured conversion loss of 12 dB with a 3-dB bandwidth of 8- 30 GHz, and an IF instantaneous bandwidth of up to 8 GHz. The measured harmonic rejection ratio (HRR) at the 2nd, 3rd and 5th harmonics is better than 27 dBc across the entire bandwidth. An input P1dB of 4.2-7 dBm is achieved at 8–30 GHz due to the passive architecture. Application areas are in high linearity high-If mm-wave 5G systems and wideband receivers.