A 76–81 GHz CMOS mmW quadrature down-conversion mixer for automotive radar applications

Abstract

This paper presents a mmW quadrature down-conversion mixer for 76-81 GHz automotive radar applications. A transformer-based g m-boosting method and a new cascode inter-stage network are proposed to improve the gain of preamplifier. A pair of cross-coupled transistors are exploited to bleed dynamic current into mixer core to reduce noise figure while utilizing its negative resistance to improve conversion gain. The mixer is implemented in a 55-nm CMOS process and the measurement results show that the BW −3dB is 5.5 GHz, the peak gain is 4.1 dB with <0.16 dB I/Q mismatch, the input P1dB is up to −6 dBm and the minimum noise figure (NF min) is 19 dB while dissipating 40 mW of power. The achieved FOM is up to 0.02.

Analysis of high frequency behaviors of the self-biased TIA stage and implementation of an up-conversion mixer in millimeter-wave/terahertz band

“…The IF frequency band can range from zero-IF to several-GHz [14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21], and a higher IF helps support higher transmission rates. Therefore, in order to ensure the IF bandwidth, the IF stage of the up-/down conversion mixer needs to be handled carefully, which has a major impact on the IF bandwidth of the mixer, and the gain also affects the overall performance.…”

Analysis of the parameter extraction for on-chip transmission lines

“…With the development of millimeter-wave applications such as 60GHz wireless communications [1,2] and 77GHz automotive radars [3,4,5], on-chip integrated systems have attracted much more attention. As a flexible and reliable passive element, the transmission line becomes quite attractive in implementing matching functions for RF (radio frequency) integrated circuits [6,7].…”