Design of a 20-80 GHz down-conversion mixer for 5G wireless communication with 22nm CMOS

This paper proposes a 20-80 GHz RF double-balanced mixer utilizing a hybrid down-conversion scheme. To achieve the down-conversion over the entire range, two mixers are operating in double-down-conversion for fixed IF of 3 GHz and RF is divided into low-band 20-44GHz and high-band 44-80GHz. For the low-band, the first mixer is bypassed and the second mixer used for down-conversion. For the high-band, both mixers are used for down-conversion. This results in reducing the LO tuning range by over 50% as compared to a regular sliding IF scheme. The design is evaluated using simulations of the designed mixer in 22nm CMOS technology, achieving a conversion gain of over 5 dB throughout the RF bandwidth, a minimum IIP3 of 4.9 dBm and minimum noise figure of 5.1 dB.