A D-band Passive-Mixer-First Receiver Front-End For an IF-Beamforming Phased Array in 45nm RFSOI

This paper presents a highly linear D-band mixer-first receiver (RX) with an on-chip image-rejection filter for an intermediate-frequency (IF) beamforming phased array. The proposed design exploits IF-to-RF impedance transparency to achieve tunable channel selectivity and input matching using a two-path mixer loaded with an LC resonator. The image frequency is effectively suppressed by selecting a high IF frequency (30 GHz) and employing an on-chip low-loss image-rejection filter. The proposed mixer-first RX is implemented using 45RFSOI with an active chip area of 0.38 mm2. The fabricated chip demonstrates a maximum conversion gain of 11.1 dB, an IP1dB of -8 dBm, and a minimum single sideband noise figure of 14.3 dB. The measured input return loss is higher than 10 dB over a bandwidth greater than 46 GHz by sweeping the LO frequency.