Ultra low power active 60 GHz Bi-CMOS down-conversion mixer

A active sub-harmonic mixer is designed for 60 GHz unlicensed-band applications and is fabricated on Jazz's SiGe 0.18 μm high performance process. The mixer has a RF bandwidth of 9 GHz centered at 60 GHz, a LO of 24 GHz of 3.5 GHz bandwidth, with an IF output frequency of 12 GHz. The mixer is able to achieve 4.9 dB of conversion gain including buffer loss. It has an input referred P1dB of -7.6 dBm while achieving extremely low LO drive requirements of -14 dBm. Spurious rejection is better than 30 dBc with reference to IF frequency. Including both RF and DC probe pads it occupies a silicon area of 860 μm × 820 μm. It dissipates only 3.18 mA with a buffer consuming 9.4 mA of current from a 1.8 V voltage supply.