10-to-30-GHz Blocker-Tolerant Mixer-First Receivers with 40-dB/decade Transition-Band Roll-Off and Maximum 61.7-dB LO-to-RF Isolation

This paper presents two RF-to-Millimeter-Wave blocker-tolerant mixer-first receivers. A feedforward path with phase compensation is designed parallel to the main path to cancel the out-of-band (OOB) blocker. It can break the trade-off between mixer switch size and OOB rejection, thereby simultaneously achieving high transition-band roll-off and excellent LO-to-RF isolation. In addition, a balanced input network is employed to achieve broadband input matching. LC tanks are introduced into the second design to further improve the OOB rejection. Fabricated in a 130 nm SOI CMOS process, the proposed receivers achieve a transition-band roll-off of 40 dB/decade and OOB rejection of 25-55 dB in the frequency range of 10-30 GHz. It also achieves a maximum LO-to-RF isolation of 61.7 dB at 11 GHz.