A Broadband Folded Gilbert-Cell CMOS Mixer

A folded Gilbert cell mixer has been implemented in a 0.13 mum CMOS technology. RF- and IF- frequencies of the down conversion mixer were 5.5 GHz and 500 MHz, respectively. A power conversion gain of 4.6 dB and a noise figure of 14.2 dB have been demonstrated experimentally under very low power consumption, only 4.2 mW for the mixer core. Considering the overall performances of the circuit, this paper shows that the folded mixer architecture is one of the most interesting frequency converter solutions for low-power mobile applications.