High-performance current bleeding CMOS mixer

A high-performance mixer, known as the amplifier-driven double-balanced Gilbert-cell mixer, is proposed and implemented in 0.18μm RFCMOS technology. A class-A amplifier-based current bleeding source is used to amplify the local oscillator signal and improve transconductance of the transconductor stage. The conversion gain is measured to be 17.5dB when the LO power is -14dBm only. The measured noise figure is better than 12.5dB. The chip area is 1.2×1.3mm and the power consumption is 12mA at 1.5V supply voltage.Department of Electrical Engineerin