RF Microelectronics

Chapter 6. Mixers

In this chapter, our study of building blocks focuses on downconversion and upconversion mixers, which appear in the receive path and the transmit path, respectively. While a decade ago, most mixers were realized as a Gilbert cell, many more variants have recently been introduced to satisfy the specific demands of different RX or TX architectures. In other words, a stand-alone mixer design is no longer meaningful because its ultimate performance heavily depends on the circuits surrounding it. The outline of the chapter is shown below.

6.1 General Considerations

Mixers perform frequency translation by multiplying two waveforms ...