ABSTRACT
This chapter presents design issues and techniques related to millimeterwave mixer designs. It introduces the mixer fundamentals including the mixing mechanism, transconductance stage design and mixer balance issues. The chapter discusses techniques and topologies such as the field-effect-transistor (FET) resistive mixers and Gilbert cell-based double-balanced mixers, related to the fundamental mixer designs. Basically, the mixer performs frequency translation by multiplying two signals, which at most of the time are called radio frequency (RF) signals and local oscillation (LO) signals. Since mixer has linearity requirements, the transconductor must be proper designed, which is also has influence on the system's sensitivity and other performance. The mixer can be implemented with either diodes or FET/Bipolar junction transistors. FET resistive mixers have a number of merits such as circuit simplicity high linearity and low 1/f noise, which are achieved by operating the mixing transistors at zero drain biasing condition.
