Design of V-band CMOS down-converting cascode mixer

This article presents a V-band down-converting cascode mixer fabricated in the 0.13-μm CMOS process. The mixer utilizes the cascode topology and adds a buffer to avoid loading effects. The V-band mixer exhibits a conversion gain of -1.7 dB, an input 1-dB compression point of -8 dBm at RF of 60 GHz, IF of 5 GHz, and LO power of 0 dBm. The RF-IF isolation is more than 26 dB. The LO-RF isolation is more than 15 dB. In addition to the good agreement between simulation and measurement, the proposed cascode CMOS mixer with a small chip size has a complete measured performance for further 60-GHz receiver RF front-end integration.