Compact and Broadband Up and Down Conversion Mixers for Frequency Interleaving Systems

This paper presents broadband up and down conversion mixers fabricated in 130nm SiGe technology. The fully differential design is optimized for very small area occupation and low power consumption to be scaled to multiple up and down converters for frequency interleaving systems. The mixers can be driven by local oscillator frequencies between 10 and 25GHz with an radio frequency bandwidth of 2.5GHz. The corresponding RF signals range from 7.5 to 27.5GHz. The mixers are designed in a broadband fashion, avoiding the use of matching networks, expensive in terms of both area occupation and bandwidth, and include input and output buffers for allowing measurement in a 50Ω environment. With an active area size of 0.012mm<sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup>, both proposed mixers occupy a silicon area which is, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, one order of magnitude smaller when compared to the state-of-the-art.