GaInP/GaAs HBT Sub-Harmonic Gilbert Mixers Using Stacked-LO and Leveled-LO Topologies

0.13‐μM CMOS Q‐band leveled‐LO subharmonic mixer with injection‐locked frequency‐divider quadrature generator

“…The subharmonic Gilbert mixer is composed of source-coupled transistor pairs (M1-M2, …, M7-M8) at an LO stage and transconductance pairs (M9-M10) at an RF stage. The source-coupled pairs including drainconnected pairs form the leveled-LO cell [5]. The fundamental signals are eliminated and the even harmonic signals appear at the drainconnected nodes when differential quadrature signals inject into the gate terminals of the leveled-LO cell.…”

“…A double-balanced Gilbert cell mixer has advantages in terms of a conversion gain, isolation, and compact size [2][3][4]. A subharmonic mixer is still a popular choice and overcomes conventional difficulties in generating high-frequency local oscillator (LO) signals for a fundamental mixer [5] because an LO frequency is only half of the RF frequency. Furthermore, a quadrature LO input is needed for the subharmonic Gilbert mixer.…”

“…However, it is well known that the attenuation constant of the on-chip transmission line increases as the operating frequency increases due to losses in the conductive silicon substrate as well as the series resistance of the metallization. Various methods, such as high-resistivity silicon [2], front/back side micromachining [3], porous silicon [4], and proton implantation [5], have been reported to reduce the substrate loss. Nevertheless, most of the proposed methods are very difficult, if not impossible, to be integrated into the standard CMOS technology because of their inherent nonstandard processing steps.…”

A 38 to 44 GHZ Sub-Harmonic Balanced HBT Mixer With Integrated Miniature Spiral Type Marchand Balun

“…Reported SHM topologies based on HBT's can roughly be classified into three categories: 1) Switched Gm-based circuits using stacked LO quads in a Gilbert cell configuration [4]; 2) Balanced transistor pairs followed by IF buffering for selection of the subharmonic mixing product [5,6]; and 3) LO frequency doublers integrated together with a fundamental frequency mixer to enhance the sub-harmonic mixing product of the overall circuit [7,8]. Recently, the authors demonstrated a novel balanced HBT based SHM topology for E-band wireless applications [9].…”

Characteristics of GaAs transformers for RFIC applications

“…The GaInP/GaAs HBT Gilbert mixers exhibit excellent performance. Low-IF Hartley receiver with polyphase filters, dual conversion Weaver receiver, and subharmonic direct conversion receiver have also been implemented by the GaInP/GaAs HBT technology [12][13][14][15]. Transformer-based GaInP/GaAs Gilbert mixers have been demonstrated for the low-voltage operation at high frequencies [5] [16].…”