A 22 to 44 GHz Broadband Passive Mixer-First Receiver Achieving 9.3 dB NF in 45nm RFSOI

This work presents a wideband 4-path passive mixer-first receiver that covers 22 to 44 GHz. The receiver relies on a broadband LO generation circuit that uses a 2-stage transformer-based polyphase network to produce quadrature LO signals with low amplitude and phase errors across a >30 GHz bandwidth. The polyphase network is followed by LO drivers that use gain-equalized transformers for bandwidth extension. The noise figure (NF) is optimized using an input matching network topology that balances insertion loss with wideband suppression of I/Q charge sharing caused by LO signal overlap. The proposed circuit was fabricated in 45-nm RFSOI and occupies an area of 1.12 mm^2. It exhibits a maximum conversion gain of 22 dB with a 3-dB bandwidth of 22 GHz. The receiver achieves a minimum NF of 9.3 dB, maintains an NF <10 dB from 22 to 38 GHz, and consumes 64 mW of DC power.