A 16-53-GHz CMOS Down-Conversion Mixer With Linearized Active Balun

In this paper, a 16 to 53 GHz linearized mixer with active balun in 65-nm CMOS technology for the 5G application is presented. An active balun is used to cancel the 3rd-order intermodulation (IM3) power in larger RF/IF power region of the mixer. In addition, by using the stabilized design in the IF inverter buffer amplifier, the stability of the proposed structure at high frequency can be improved by sacrificing very little gain. The measured conversion gain is -0.5 +/- 2 dB with operating frequency that covers from 16 to 53 GHz, and the measured IP1dB/IIP3 are -1.5/20 dBm and 0/21 dBm at 28 and 38 GHz, respectively. In addition, the measurement result of quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) demodulation is presented. The mixer consumes only 5.9-mW dc power, including the buffer and active balun, with a compact chip area of 0.51 x 0.67 mm(2).