A broadband folded Gilbert cell CMOS mixer

A folded Gilbert cell mixer was implemented in 0.13 μm complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology. The downconversion mixer is designed for 5---6 GHz radio frequency (RF) band and an intermediate frequency (IF) of 500 MHz. A voltage conversion gain (CG) of 9 dB, a noise figure (NF) of 11 dB and an IIP3 of 2 dBm were demonstrated experimentally under very low power consumption conditions, only 4.2 mW for the mixer core. Considering the overall performance 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.