Inductors allow low-voltage performance for IC mixers

In this paper it is established how planar inductors on silicon and bond-wire inductors can be used to scale down the supply voltage to 1.5 V for Gilbert type RF mixers. A demonstration mixer which downconverts a signal from 900 MHz to an intermediate frequency of 50 MHz is implemented in a 0.8 /spl mu/m BiCMOS process offered by Austria Mikro Systeme International GmbH. The measurement results for the mixer as well the lumped element models for the used planar inductor and for the bondwire are presented. The measurements suggest that a pleasing return loss of about 9 dB is obtained for both the input and output ports of the mixer without using any external components for impedance matching.