ARTICLE IN PRESS

Microelectronics Journal 39 (2008) 1860 1866

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Microelectronics Journal
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/mejo

A low-noise mixer with an image-reject notch lter for 2.4 GHz applications
Nam-Jin Oh
Department of Electronic Engineering, Chungju National University, 123 Geomdan-ri, Iryu-myeon, Chungju, Chungbuk 380-702, Republic of Korea

a r t i c l e in f o
Article history: Received 21 March 2007 Received in revised form 3 April 2008 Accepted 16 April 2008 Available online 9 June 2008 Keywords: CMOS Heterodyne Image rejection lter Low-noise mixer Noise gure

a b s t r a c t
This paper presents a low noise rst down-conversion mixer with a notch lter for the heterodyne receiver. The notch lter connected to the output node of the mixer driver stage plays a role of image rejection at an image frequency, thereby suppressing the sideband image noise and improving the mixer noise performance. Targeted for 2.4 GHz industrialscienticmedical band applications, a simple source-degenerated down-conversion single balanced mixer with the lter is implemented. The measurement results of the proposed down-conversion mixer shows about 3.0 dB improvement of single-side band noise gure, about 2.9 dB power conversion gain improvement, and 25 dB image suppression compared to those without the lter dissipating 4 mA from a 2.5 V supply voltage. & 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction While research and development for a direct conversion radio transreceiver has been active recently, heterodyne radio architecture has been widely adopted for several decades, and is still prevalent for many commercial products. Fig. 1 shows a conventional heterodyne radio receiver frontend which comprises an radio frequency (RF) band pass lter (BPF), a low-noise amplier (LNA), an image rejection lter (IRF), a down-conversion mixer, and an intermediate frequency (IF) lter. The down-conversion mixer is used for frequency translation of a RF signal down to an IF by mixing the RF signal from the LNA with the local oscillator (LO) signal. The front-end blocks such as LNA and down-conversion mixer mainly affect the receiver noise gure (NF). Since the LNA predominantly affects the receiver NF, it is required to have a low NF to receive very weak signals. The next noise contributor is a down-conversion mixer. A low NF mixer relaxes the gain requirement of the preceding LNA. A mixer with high-power gain reduces the noise contribution from the following IF stages [1]. Usually, the lters are implemented externally. They make several decibels of signal losses in the signal path and thereby degrade the overall receiver NF. In this paper, a simple down-conversion single balanced mixer (SBM) with a notch lter [2,3] targeted at 2.4 GHz applications is presented to achieve low NF, high-power gain, and an image rejection. The emphasis is on the image rejection lter implementation, and the noise analysis of the proposed mixer.
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2. Mixer design considerations For a cascaded system as shown in Fig. 1, it can be shown that the LNA must have enough gain to suppress the noise contribution by the following stages such as down-conversion mixer and IF lter. The system noise factor expressed in linear scale can be written as NF 1 NFLNA 1 1 LIR NFMIX 1 LRF LRF LRF GLNA LIR LRF GLNA LIR (1)

E-mail address: onamjin@cjnu.ac.kr 0026-2692/$ - see front matter & 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.mejo.2008.04.007

where LRF and LIR are the insertion losses of the RF lter and the image rejection lter, respectively, NFLNA and NFMIX are the NFs of the LNA and the down-conversion mixer, respectively; and GLNA is the power gain of the LNA. Based on the typical heterodyne receiver specications and assuming LRF 3 dB, NFLNA 1.5 dB, GLNA 15 dB, LIR 6.0 dB and NFMIX 13 dB, the calculated overall system NF is 8.9 dB. If the NF of the mixer NFMIX 10 dB, the system noise performance can be signicantly improved to 7.22 dB. Analyzing the linearity for the cascaded system, the linearity of the latter stages becomes increasingly important and hence sufciently high linearity of a mixer is required. To improve the receiver linearity, the gain of the LNA also should not be too high, which in turn leads to the NF degradation of the receiver. Lowering the mixer NF can compensate the degradation of the receiver NF. The next consideration is an image problem. Many heterodyne receivers adopt double conversion architecture with high IF over several hundred megahertz to provide an inherent image rejection, and employ low-side mixing (LO has lower frequency than

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N.-J. Oh / Microelectronics Journal 39 (2008) 18601866 1861

RFIN

This work Mixer RF Filter LNA Image Reject Filter IFOUT IF Filter

LO
Fig. 1. Conventional heterodyne radio receiver front-end.

RF) for the rst down conversion [4,5]. However, the image rejection ratio cannot be obtained enough at GHz range high frequencies. So, an integrated image reject mixer for the rst down conversion has advantage of suppressing the image frequency and noise furthermore.

fLO

fIF fRF

3fLO

Usually, the active mixers (in silicon technology) have a singleside band (SSB) NF greater than 10 dB. The mixer is noisy because side band noise is translated from multiple frequency bands to the output and the input RF signal power is translated to multiple frequency bands by frequency mixing as shown in Fig. 2. Thus, the mixer inherently has high NF compared to those of ampliers. The mixer noise contributing components consist of driver stage noise, switching pair noise, LO signal noise and thermal noise from the load resistor. Among the noise contributing components, the driver stage noise dominates the mixer noise performances. 3.1. Noise for a nondegenerated single balanced mixer Fig. 3 shows a nondegenerated active SBM, and a small-signal equivalent circuit of the RF input driver stage. The noise sources are modeled in the input and output. Assuming that the gain of the driver stage and its output noise are constant across all frequencies, the total output noise current spectral density at the drain of the driver stage is Sa 4kT Rs Rg g 2 m gk xg d0 (2)

Power

3. Mixer noise analysis

5fLO

Frequency
Fig. 2. Frequency translations of white noise in the driver stage (dotted line) and RF signal translations by mixing with LO (solid line).

where     1 1 p 2 n2 1 2 2 2 5 3 (4)

where k is Boltzmanns constant, T is the absolute temperature, Rs is the source resistance, Rg is the gate resistance, gm is the transconductance, g is a bias-dependent factor, gd0 is the zero-bias drain conductance, k is the combined parameter for the drain channel current noise and the correlated induced gate noise, and x is the parameter for the uncorrelated induced gate noise [6]. From (2), the rst term is due to the source resistance and polysilicon gate resistance, the second term is due to the induced gate noise and drain channel current noise. Assuming the LO switching is square wave-like, the LO frequency and its odd harmonics will downconvert the respective noise components to the IF. Since the mixer conversion gain is 2/p, the mixer output noise current spectral density is  2 2 i2 (3) no;M1 nSa p

is the noise increase factor and originates from the harmonic amplitudes of the square-wave [7,8]. From (3), it can be shown that the mixing process increases the noise contribution by a factor of (p/2)2 or 3.9 dB. As shown in Fig. 2, the rst term of (4) is noise at fLO7fIF downconverted by the fundamental LO, the second term is noise at 3fLO7fIF downconverted by the third harmonic of the LO, and so on. The rst and second term account for 81% and 9% of the noise transferred to the output, respectively. The remaining 10% comes from the higherorder LO harmonics7fIF [9]. The output noise current spectral density due to the switch noise and the output load resistor (if two load resistors RL are used) is i2 no;sw;RL 8kT  gI 1 pA RL  (5)

where I is the tail xed current, A is the LO amplitude [7]. In (5), the noise contribution of the switches can be minimized with a large LO signal.

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IF

IF

LO M2 X iD 1 CX M3

LO

RF M1

v2 n,Rg

Rg
+

iD1

Rs i2 ng v2 ns
-

gg

Cgs

vgs

gmvgs

i2 nd

CX

Fig. 3. (a) A nondegenerated active single balanced mixer and (b) small-signal equivalent circuit of the RF input driver stage for noise calculation.

By summing up (3) and (5), the total output noise current spectral density of the nondegenerated SBM is given as  2   2 gI 1 . 4kTnRs Rg g 2 8kT m gk xg d0 p pA RL

and imaginary poles at s C1 CX op C X C 1 L1

(9)

i2 no

(6)

3.2. Noise for a single balanced mixer with degeneration Fig. 4 shows the proposed image rejection low noise mixer with source degeneration and a notch lter, and a small signal equivalent circuit of the RF input stage. The differential outputs are combined as a single-ended output with a power combiner [10]. In Fig. 4(b), the notch lter nullies the parasitic capacitance by parallel resonating at the signal frequency, thus makes high impedance at node X and thereby increases the signal contribution of M1. Also, the lter boosts the image rejection by series resonating at the image frequency, thus makes low impedance at node X and thereby reduces the image frequency gain [11]. Including the parasitic capacitance CX, the input impedance of the lter, Zf, can be written as s2 C 1 L1 1 . X C 1 L1 C 1 C X

Fig. 5 shows the simulated transfer function of the driver stage for the nondegenerated single balanced and source-degenerated active mixers with and without the notch lter. With including the notch lter, the noise at the image frequency would be rejected, and about half of 81% noise translated from fLO7fIF is suppressed. The noise translated from 3fLO7fIF, 5fLO7fIF and so on, which corresponds about 19% can be signicantly suppressed. Thus, at least over 50% (or 3 dB) noise performance can be improved in the proposed mixer. In Fig. 4, the overall transconductance of the degenerated input stage is given by Gm gm oT oC gs Rs oT Ls oRs 1 oT Ls =Rs (10)

Z f s

ss2 C

(7)

The lter has imaginary zeros at 1 oz p C 1 L1

where the cut-off frequency oT is equal to gm/Cgs. From (10), the output noise power density is dependent on frequency [6]. Thus, the output noise current density is reduced at higher frequencies, thereby resulting in smaller noise translation to the IF and improving the mixer noise performance. Also, the noise contribution from the image frequency can be suppressed by the notch lter. At the RF frequency, the output noise component due to the resistances of Rs (source resistance), Rg (polysilicon gate resistance), and Rl (series resistance of the gate inductor) is Sa;Rs ;Rl ;Rg oRF 4kT o2 T
2 o2 RF Rs 1

(8)

oT Ls =Rs 2

Rs Rl Rg .

(11)

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N.-J. Oh / Microelectronics Journal 39 (2008) 18601866 1863

Combiner

VDD

L2 = 11nH

RL

RL

L3= 8.5nH IF

C2 = 5pF Switching LO M2 Driver Lg = 15.5nH RF M1 Ls = 1.5nH 40 m 3 CX iD1 40 m 3 X Zf 40 m 3

C3 = 2pF

LO M3

L1 = 9nH

C1 =1.7 pF Filter

Lg

Rg

Rl

iD1

Rs

v2 n,Rg

L1
Rl

i2 ng v2 ns

gg

Cgs

vgs

gmvgs

2 i nd

CX

C1

Filter

Ls

Fig. 4. (a) Proposed image rejection low noise mixer with source degeneration and a notch lter and (b) small-signal equivalent circuit of the RF input driver stage for noise calculation.

The output noise component due to the induced gate noise and drain current noise is Sa;ing ;ind oRF . 1 oT Ls =Rs 2 4kT gk xg d0 (12)

inductor degenerated mixer is given by i2 no Rs Rl Rg gk xg d0 2 1 oT Ls =Rs 2 o2 RF Rs  2   2 gI 1 8kT . p pA RL 4kT o2 T !

(14)

The output noise current spectral density translated from the RF frequency to the IF due to the driver stage is
2 i2 no;RF Sa;Rs ;Rl ;Rg oRF Sa;ing ;ind oRF 2=p .

(13)

Including the noise sources in the switches, and the load resistor, the total output noise current spectral density of the

By comparing (6) and (14), it can be seen that the noise translation from the image frequency and the higher-order LO harmonics is suppressed. For the double balanced mixer, the noise sources from the driver stage and switches become twice as compared to the SBM. Another noise from the driver stage at the IF can feed through to

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10 16
NF with filter NF without filter

0 Gain (dB)

15 14

-10

Noise Figure (dB)

5fLO

13 12 11 10 9 2490

-20

Nondegenerated mixer without filter Nondegenerated mixer with filter Degenerated mixer without filter Degenerated mixer with filter fIF fIM fLO fRF 3fLO

-30 Frequency
Fig. 5. Simulated transfer function of the driver stage.

2500

2510

2520 Frequency (MHz)

2530

2540

2550

12 11 10 Gain (dB) 9 8 7 6 5 2490

Gain with filter Gain without filter

Fig. 6. Fabricated chip micrograph.

the output. Since the driver stage has some gain at the IF, the output noise of the mixer would increase if a single-ended output is taken, and can be suppressed by taking the IF output differentially since the IF noise is common-mode [8]. The proposed technique can be an effective way to improve NF of a mixer, especially when the low-side mixing is adopted as in the case of double conversion receiver.

2500

2510

2520 Frequency (MHz)

2530

2540

2550

Fig. 7. Measured (a) NF and (b) conversion gain.

4. Measurement results A SBM with a notch lter is implemented in 0.18 mm CMOS technology as shown in Fig. 6. For measurements, the IF output combiner and the image reject notch lter are implemented with external inductors and capacitors on printed circuit boards. The measurement is taken with a NF meter. A balun is used to transform the single-ended LO signal to differential. BPFs are used for the RF input to measure the SSB NF and for the LO input to stop the noise contribution from the LO signal generator, respectively. Also, an IF bandpass lter is used to prevent the saturation of NF meter input. The degeneration inductor Ls is implemented by using a bond-wire which has inductor value of 0.8 nH/mm. The mixer consumes about 4.0 mA from a 2.5 V supply. The low-side mixing is used for the measurement as in the cases of widely adopted double conversion heterodyne receiver. The LO and IF frequencies are 2026 and 484 MHz, respectively. The applied LO input power is 3 dBm. Because the LO port is matched to higher impedance rather than 50 O, the LO swing can be assumed to be large. The input port is matched with a return loss less than 10 dB. The measurement results of SSB NF and conversion gain are plotted in Fig. 7 with an RF input frequency sweep. The measurement results show that over 3.0 dB improvement of SSB NF, and over 2.9 dB conversion gain increase are achieved. The image frequency of 1,542 MHz is applied to the RF input to measure the image suppression. Around 25 dB image suppression for the proposed mixer with the notch lter is achieved compared with 7 dB without the lter as shown in Figs. 8 and 9, respectively. The measured input IP3 of the mixer with and without the notch lter is about 9.9 and 4.6 dBm, respectively, as shown in Fig. 10. Table 1 summarizes the measured results of the proposed mixer with and without the notch lter compared to those of other results.

5. Conclusion This paper presented a low-noise down-conversion SBM with a detailed noise analysis for the 2.4 GHz double-conversion receiver application. A notch lter is connected to the output node of the driver stage of the mixer to suppress the image noise. With the image rejection notch lter and source degeneration inductor, lower NF, higher gain, and a partial image rejection are achieved. While consuming 4 mA current from 2.5 V supply, the proposed mixer achieves conversion gain of 10 dB, noise gure of 10.3 dB,

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N.-J. Oh / Microelectronics Journal 39 (2008) 18601866 1865

Fig. 8. IF spectrum without the notch lter (a) from the RF frequency and (b) from the image frequency. Image suppression is about 7 dB.

Fig. 9. IF spectrum with the notch lter (a) from the RF frequency and (b) from the image frequency. Image suppression is about 25 dB.

Table 1 Performance comparison of the proposed degenerated mixer Topology This work SBM+IRF 2.5 4 10 9.9 10.3 2.510 25 0.18 mm CMOS [11] LNA+IRF 1.8 3.7 4.3 5.25 16 0.25 mm CMOS [12] LNA+IRF 1.8 4 18a 2 1.4 5.8 16 0.18 mm CMOS [13] SBM 1 0.5 20.4a 13.1b 2.4 0.18 mm CMOS [14] SBM 1.25 0.3 7 10 o20 0.9 0.25 mm CMOS [15] SBM 1.8 6 4.5 11.5 14.6 5.8 0.18 mm CMOS

Supply voltage (V) Current (mA) Gain (dB) Input IP3 (dBm) NF (dB) Operating frequency (GHz) Image suppression (dB) Technology
a b

Voltage gain. Measured at 50 MHz IF.

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IIP3 with filter IIP3 without filter

IIP3=-9.9 dBm

IIP3=-4.6 dBm

Output Power (dBm)

-20

-40

-60

-80

-40

-30

-20 Input Power (dBm)

-10

Fig. 10. IIP3 of the proposed degenerated mixer with a notch lter compared to that without the lter.

image suppression of 25 dB, and the input third-order intercept point of 9.9 dBm. References
[1] K.L. Fong, R.G. Meyer, A 2.4 GHz monolithic mixer for wireless LAN applications, in: ProcEeding of the IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference, 1997, pp. 185188.

[2] Nam-Jin Oh, Sang-Gug Lee, A low noise down-conversion mixer with suppression of image-noise by using an image-reject notch lter, in: ProcEeding of the Asia Pacic Microwave Conference, 2003, pp. 890893. [3] Nam-Jin Oh, Moon-Su Yang, Sang-Gug Lee, Apparatus for low noise and image repression of heterodyne receiver, Korea Patent 10-0573924, 2006. [4] M. Zargari, et al., A 5 GHz CMOS transceiver for IEEE 802.11a wireless LAN system, IEEE J. Solid-State Circuits 37 (12) (2002) 16881694. [5] A. Zolfaghari, B. Razavi, A low-power 2.4 GHz transmitter/receiver CMOS IC, IEEE J. Solid-State Circuits 38 (2) (2003) 176183. [6] D.K. Shaeffer, T.H. Lee, A 1.5 V and 1.5 GHz low noise amplier, IEEE J. SolidState Circuits 32 (5) (1997) 745759. [7] H. Darabi, A.A. Abidi, Noise in RF-CMOS mixers: a simple physical model, IEEE Trans. Solid-State Circuits 35 (1) (2000) 1525. [8] K.L. Fong, C.D. Hull, R.G. Meyer, A class AB monolithic mixer for 900-MHz applications, IEEE J. Solid-State Circuits 32 (8) (1997) 11661172. [9] M.T. Terrovitis, R.G. Meyer, Noise in current-commutating CMOS mixers, IEEE J. Solid-State Circuits 34 (6) (1999) 772783. [10] A.K. Wong, S.H. Lee, M.G. Wong, Current combiner enhances active mixer performance, in: Microwaves and RF, 1994, pp. 156165. [11] T.H. Lee, H. Samavati, H.R. Rategh, 5 GHz CMOS wireless LANs, IEEE Trans. Microwave Theory Tech. 50 (1) (2002) 268280. [12] J.-P. Kim, Y.-H. Oh, J.-Y. Choi, S.-G. Lee, A 5.8 GHz LNA with image rejection and gain control based on 0.18-mm CMOS, Microwave Opt. Technol. Lett. 38 (6) (2003) 477480. [13] T. Song, H.-S. Oh, S. Hong, E. Yoon, A 2.4 GHz sub-mW CMOS receiver frontend for wireless sensors network, IEEE Microwave Wireless Components Lett. 16 (4) (2006) 206208. [14] H. Darabi, A.A. Abidi, A 4.5 mW 900 MHz CMOS receiver for wireless paging, IEEE J. Solid-State Circuits 35 (8) (2000) 10851096. [15] Y.-K. Chu, H.-R. Chuang, A 5 GHz 0.18 mm CMOS mixer for 802.11a WLAN receiver applications, Microwave J. 47 (2) (2004) 106118.