Abstract: A passive current switch mixer was designed for the second IF down-conversion in a DRM/DAB receiver. The circuit consists of an input transconductance stage, a passive current switching stage, and a current amplifier stage. The input transconductance stage employs a self-biasing current reusing technique, with a resistor shunt feedback to increase the gain and output impedance. A dynamic bias technique is used in the switching stage to ensure the stability of the overdrive voltage versus the PVT variations. A current shunt feedback is introduced to the conventional low-voltage second-generation fully balanced multi-output current converter (FBMOCCII), which provides very low input impedance and high output impedance. With the circuit working in current mode, the linearity is effectively improved with low supply voltages. Especially, the transimpedance stage can be removed, which simplifies the design considerably. The design is verified with a SMIC 0.18 μ m RF CMOS process. The measurement results show that the voltage conversation gain is 1.407 dB, the NF is 16.22 dB, and the IIP3 is 4.5 dBm, respectively. The current consumption is 9.30 mA with a supply voltage of 1.8 V. This exhibits a good compromise among the gain, noise, and linearity for the second IF mixer in DRM/DAB receivers.

Key words: CMOSRF, current mode, passive current switching mixer, FBMOCCII, DRM, DAB