NEW ENHANCED NOISE ANALYSIS IN ACTIVE MIXERS IN NANOSCALE TECHNOLOGIES

Abstract

In this paper, a new enhanced noise analysis for active mixers in nanoscale technologies, based on the variations of the two parameters W/L (transistor size) and fLO (local oscillator frequency) is presented. In this study, two important sections of an active mixer, the switching pair and the transconductor are considered. It is shown that the noise generated by the switching pair and the transconductor is reduced with the technology scaling from 90 nm to 45 nm. Also, it is shown that the variations of the noise generated by the switching pair due to W/L variations in a wide range of local oscillator frequency and in different technology nodes is less than the variations of the noise generated by the transconductor, which shows the importance of the transconductor in the generation of the total mixer output noise. For extracting the noise relations, the contribution of the gate resistance noise to the gate and drain total current noises is considered, whereas this noise is usually assumed to be an independent source in the literature.