Comparative Study of Broadband RF Subharmonic Mixers in Submicron Technology

With the advancements in wireless technologies a lot of concern has been given for designing RF circuits and the designers are trying to introduce new topologies to achieve better outputs whether be at transmitter or receiver section of a communication system and this in-turn has led to the development of individual components of these systems. In this paper, a review of various broadband configurations of the mixer component of receiver/transmitter is given. In general first the fundamental mixers (diode-based and FET-based) are reviewed and later on subharmonic mixer configuration are discussed in detail. Keywords― Gilbert cell mixer, subharmonic mixers, direct conversion receiver, CMOS technology, DSB noise figure, isolation, anti parallel diode pair (APDP).