Calibration Techniques of Active BiCMOS Mixers

This paper describes calibration techniques for downconversion mixers used in integrated direct-conversion receivers. A method of achieving a high even-order intermodulation rejection is presented. Using the method presented, the receiver second-order input intercept point (IIP2) can always be improved by more than 20 dB. The minimum achieved receiver IIP2 after calibration is +38 dBm. A technique to enhance the / -amplitude balance between the quadrature channels is also introduced. A single-balanced adjustable mixer is implemented as a part of a prototype direct-conversion receiver. The receiver chip consists of a low-noise amplifier, mixers and calibration circuitry, a divide-by-two circuit, local oscillator (LO) buffers for LO generation, and active baseband filters. The chip is fabricated using a 0.35m SiGe BiCMOS process and is characterized at 900 MHz.