JOURNAL OF TELECOMMUNICATIONS, VOLUME 13, ISSUE 2, APRIL 2012 32

Low Flicker Noise CMOS Subthreshold Mixer for 2.4 GHz Application
M. Safari, S. Toofan and A. Jalilvand
Abstract This paper presents a low flicker noise, 2.4 GHz down conversion 0.18m-CMOS subthreshold mixer based on double balanced Gilbert cell. The flicker noise is a strong factor of mixer noise figure. In order to reduce its noise figure, all transistors are biased in subthreshold region at this work. Also, a static current injection circuit (current bleeding circuit) is used to improve its noise performance. Simulation results of designed mixer show 21.1 dB conversion gain and 6.32 dB average noise figure at 1 GHz - 6 GHz. Moreover, these demonstrate that using current bleeding circuit has low noise figure. Its consumption power is 10.6 mW at 1.8V supply voltage. Index TermsGilbert Mixer, Subthreshold, Flicker noise, Current bleeding, Broadband.

1 INTRODUCTION

y growing wireless communication market, demand on low power, low cost and high performance receivers dramatically increase [1]. The CMOS process decreases the cost of production and allows highlevel integration. So, it is widely applied for communication systems [2]. By using CMOS process, high integration can be attained whereas it has several inherent disadvantages, for instance small transconductance, lower breakdown voltage and serious flicker noise [3]. In linear RF circuits just as, low noise amplifiers (LNAs) the operating frequency is much higher than the flicker-noise corner frequency therefore the flicker noise is not a limiting effect [4], but the case is differs in the mixers, because the flicker noise locates in the output band of the mixer, particularly, low-IF and Zero-IF mixers [5]. The mixer is significant building block of a receiver [6]. The design of mixers includes many trade-offs among the conversion gain, linearity, noise figure (NF), and power consumption [7]. A lower noise figure and high conversion gain mixer can decrease the cost for the behind components like low noise amplifier (LNA) or power amplifier (PA). Gilbert-cell mixer (Double-Balance mixer) requires little local oscillator (LO) to gain the results of up conversion process and it can removed the even harmonic distortion, so it is the most used practical structure for designing mixer [8]. Active mixers based on the Gilbert cell structure often have a large amount of noise [9]. Mixer noise degrades signal-tonoise ratio (SNR), so consequently the total noise figure of the receiver suffers [10]. As a result, many attempts have concentrated on improving the noise performance by use of circuit techniques without additional fabrication process [3]. A lot of designs for reducing the output flicker noise of the mixer exist. Static current injection has been offered in [11]. Its aim is to reduce the bias current of the LO switches (direct mechanism of flicker noise), that is where the effects of the tail capacitance cannot be decreased (indirect mechanism of flicker noise). While

parasitic capacitance is charging and discharging the switch stage produces large flicker noise [6]. In order to reduce the effect of tail capacitance at the node between the local oscillator (LO) switches and RF transconductance stage Dynamic current injection technique with a shunt tuning inductor has been designed for 2.4GHz applications [5]. In this paper, In order to demonstrate the advantages of subthreshold mixer a 2.4 GHz CMOS active mixer is designed. The remainder of the paper is organized as follows; section II describes foundation of Gilbert cell mixer; section III presents the proposed subthreshold mixer; the simulation results are presented and compared with conventional Gilbert cell mixer in section IV; finally, in section V, the conclusion is expressed.

2 MIXER SPECIFICATION DISCUSSION

Fig. 1 shows a conventional double-balanced Gilbert mixer, which is composed of a transconductance stage, an LO switch stage, and an output load stage. The RF input signal is amplified in the transconductance stage, downconverted to an IF current signal in the LO switch stage, and then converted to a voltage signal by the output load stage [2]. A physical understanding of noise mechanisms in active mixers is crucial to identify and eliminate the noise sources [12]. The dominant noise source of the DCR mixer is flicker noise of the LO switch stage because the IF signal is located close to dc frequency, which is below the corner frequency of the noise [2]. There are two major mechanisms that generate the flicker noise. One is the direct mechanism and another is indirect mechanism. Direct mechanism is due to the finite slope of the switching pair transitions [5].

M. safari is with the Electrical Engineering Department, University of The LO switches generate noise pulse trains by the direct zanjan, Iran. mechanism and the dc average of noise pulse trains is the S. Toofan is with the Electrical Engineering Department, University of output flicker-noise current as follows: zanjan, Iran. A. Jalilvand is with the Electrical Engineering Department, University of zanjan, Iran. 2012 JOT www.journaloftelecommunications.co.uk

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VDD

VDD

Load

Rload

Rload

LO+
Switching pair

M3

M4

LO-

M5

M6

LO+

below the strong-inversion region can lead to advantages like higher gain, less power dissipation, and less harmonic distortion [16]. Due to the exponential dependence of IDS on VGS in subthreshold, the ratio of transconductance to IDS (gm/IDS) in subthreshold region is larger than that of strong inversion region [17].

ID =
M2

W I D 0eqVGS / nkT L

(3)

Transconductance stage

RF+

M1

RF-

Figure 1. Conventional CMOS Gilbert cell

gm =

io ,n ( dir ) =

Vn = 2

(4 I Vn ) (S T ) Kf

(1)

dI D W q qVGS / nkT q I D0 e = ID. dVGS L nkT nkT

(4)

Weff Leff Cox f

(2)

Where I is the bias current for the RF transconductance stage, T is the LO period, Vn is the equivalent flicker noise of the switching pair, and S is the slope of the LO signal. Weff and Leff are also the effective width and length, Cox is the oxide capacitance, f is frequency, K f and is a process parameter [13]. In order to decrease flicker noise in the direct mechanism, a popular method is to reduce the width of the noise pulses, which can be implemented by reducing the value of Vn. To reduce the value of Vn, the size of the switching pairs needs to be increased, and large switching devices increase the parasitic capacitance of the switching pairs, resulting in the flicker noise indirectly translating to the output. This is the indirect mechanism, the second mechanism that generates the flicker noise. In the indirect mechanism, flicker noise mainly depends on the tail capacitance of the node between LO switches and RF transconductance stage [14]. In order to decrease the flicker noise in CMOS active mixers, the bias current of the LO switches should be small enough to lower the height of the noise pulses. The static current injection technique was proposed to reduce the bias current of the LO switches. However, the impedance of the LO switches as seen from the RF stage is increased as we reduce the bias current of the LO switches [5]. In addition, RF leakage current flows through the injection circuit, which decreases conversion gain and also allows more RF current to be shunted by the tail capacitance (Cp) at the node between the LO switches and RF transconductance stage [1].

There is another benefit to operating the mixer transistors in weak inversion. Supposing constant gm in the transistors, the noise performance will be improved noticeably in weak inversion when compared to an implementation using devices in strong inversion. Flicker noise is inversely proportional to device size, and a weakly inverted device will be significantly larger than a strongly inverted device with identical gm. In addition, the thermal noise will be reduced because the value of the drain thermal noise factor, , will be approximately 25% smaller in weak inversion [18]. In general, increasing the bias current of the RF transconductance stage makes higher gain and better linearity possible, but a larger LO switching current causes voltage headroom issue. Therefore the static current bleeding technique is implemented by using two PMOSFETs to reduce the bias current of the LO switches [13]. Inductive peaking can be used for bandwidth extension. Series peaking is used in this design and the peaking inductors Lpeak are placed between the switching pairs and the current bleeding circuit [9]. The substrate of a MOS FET can be used as an additional input terminal as long as the substrate-source junction is kept reverse biased. The substrate potential controls the threshold voltage for an NMOS transistor as

VT = VTO + [ 2 F Vbs 2 F ]

(5)

3 THE PROPOSED MIXER DESIGN

Moderate and weak-inversion are essential and unavoidable regions for the operation of device in integrated circuits using advanced CMOS technologies [15]. Operation

Where VTO is the threshold voltage when Vbs=0, is the body effect coefficient, and F is the Fermi potential [19]. It is known that VT increases for a higher reverse-biased B-S junction in PMOS [20]. We use methods said above for designing current injection structure. The static current injection structure is shown in Fig.2 (a). It is implemented by using two PMOSFETs to reduce the bias current of the LO switches [13].

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VDD

VDD

Rload

Rload

Conversion Gain(db)

25 20 15 10 5 0 1 2 3 4 Frequency 5 x 10 6
9

LO+

M3

M4
VDD

LOVDD

M5

M6

LO+

Lpeak
Vbias

Lpeak
M7 M8
Vbias

RF+

M1

M2

RF-

Figure 4. Comparison of CG for two topologies of the mixers versus LO power; Solid line (With static current injection), dashed line (conventional)

15
Figure 2. Proposed subthreshold mixer

4 SIMULATION RESULTS
Fig.3 shows the simulated conversion gain of the mixers versus the RF frequency ranging from 1 to 6 GHz. conversion gain of the proposed subthreshold mixer is more than 10 dB than the conventional Gilbert mixer. The importance of peaking inductors in achieving gain roll of is shown in Fig.4. As illustrated in fig.4 conversion gain upgraded more than 1dB when inductors are used in proposed circuit. The simulated gain at 1 GHZ is 22.5dB and at 6 GHZ is 19.7 dB with an average of 21.1 dB. Fig.5 shows the result of the noise figure of two mixers. The NF of the proposed mixer is about 5db lower than the conventional mixer. It is obvious that NF result is got better by static current bleeding. The noise is relatively flat for the proposed mixer with an average value of 6.32 dB. In ranging from 1 to 6 GHz noise varies from 5.95 dB to 6.79 dB. In Table ! the performance comparison of the two mixers are listed.

NF(db)

10

3 4 Frequency

5 x 10

6
9

Figure 5. Comparison of NF for two topologies of the mixers; Solid line (With static current injection), dashed line (conventional)

TABLE 1 COMPARISON OF MIXERS

Parameters Process(um) Conversion Gain(db) NF(db) Conventional Gilbert cell mixer 0.18 4 12.4 6.1 Proposed subthreshold mixer 0.18 20 7.4 10.6

25

Conversion Gain(db)

20 15 10 5 0 1 2 3 4 Frequency 5 x 10 6
9

Power Consumption(mw)

5 CONCLUSION
A subthreshold mixer using static current injection technique and peaking inductor has been proposed and analyzed the improvement of noise performance. The proposed mixers are designed based on reducing the noise of each transistor and decreasing the bias current of lo switches. The Results show that the proposed subthreshold mixer has a good performance on conversion gain and noise figure.

Figure 3. Comparison of CG for two topologies of the mixers; Solid line (With static current injection), dashed line (conventional)

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tureMOSFETs for Low-Power Circuit Applications, IEEE Electron Device Letters, pp. 454-456, 2003. [21] J. Li, Z. Cheng, K. Fu, X. Zhou, and Y. Zhou, Design and Linearity Analysis of Current Bleeding CMOS Mixer for GPS Application, IEEE International Conference on communication Technology Proceedings, pp.339-342, 2008. M. Safari. She received the B.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Babol, Babol, Iran in 2005 and the MSc degree in Electrical Engineering from University of zanjan, Zanjan, Iran in 2009. Her research interests are in the field of RF CMOS ICs such as LNAs, mixers. S. Toofan. He received the B.Sc. degree in Electronics Engineering from Amirkabir University of Technology (Tehran Polytechnic) in 1999, and the MSc. And PhD degree in Electronics Engineering form the Iran University of Science and Technology (IUST) in 2002 and 2008, respectively. During 2007 to 2008, on his sabbatical leave, he was with the VLSI group of Politechnico di Torino and in the Microelectronics- Integrated Circuits Lab. of the Politechnico di Milano Universities in Italy. He has been working as assistant professor with the Department of Electrical Engineering, Zanjan University, since 2009. His current research activities include the design of CMOS Analog Integrated Circuits, RF Integrated Circuits and Capacitive Sensors Readout Circuits.

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