K-band CMOS sub-harmonic resistive mixer with a miniature Marchand balun on lossy silicon substrate

Abstract

A K-band sub-harmonically pumped resistive mixer is demonstrated using standard 0.13 mu m CMOS technology. A miniature Marchand Balun is integrated with the resistive mixer to generate equal amplitude and out-of-phase signals for mixer's local oscillation (LO) port directly on the lossy silicon substrate. The sub-harmonic resistive mixer with the integrated Marchand balun has conversion loss of 11-12 dB at f(IF) = 100 MHz and P-LO = 7 dBm for RF frequencies from 18 to 26 GHz. The LO-RF and LO-IF isolations are approximately 30 and 33 dB, respectively.