Passive Mixer-based UWB Receiver with Low Loss, High Linearity and Noise-cancelling for Medical Applications

A double balanced passive mixer-based receiver operating in the 3-5 GHz UWB for medical applications is described in this paper. The receiver front-end circuit is composed of an inductorless low noise amplifier (LNA) followed by a fully differential voltage-driven double-balanced passive mixer. A duty cycle of 25% was chosen to eliminate overlap between LO signals, thereby improving receiver linearity. The LNA realizes a gain of 25.3 dB and a noise figure of 2.9 dB. The proposed receiver achieves an IIP3 of 3.14 dBm, an IIP2 of 17.5 dBm and an input return loss (S11) below -12.5dB. Designed in 0.18μm CMOS technology, the proposed mixer consumes 0.72pW from a 1.8V power supply. The designed receiver demonstrated a good ports isolation performance with LO_IF isolation of 60dB and RF_IF isolation of 78dB