A 90‐ to 115‐GHz superheterodyne receiver front‐end for W‐band imaging system in 28‐nm complementary metal‐oxide‐semiconductor

Summary In this paper, a broadband superheterodyne receiver (RX) front‐end for millimeter‐wave (mm‐Wave) imaging radar is presented. Realized in 28‐nm CMOS technology, the proposed RX incorporates a wideband low‐noise amplifier (LNA), double‐balanced passive mixers for the dual down‐conversion, a differential power divider, a differential intermediate frequency filters, a current‐mode‐logic divider‐by‐2, and a local oscillator buffers. Wideband technique and layout optimization are taken into consideration in the RX. A four‐stage LNA is devised to realize the high gain and low noise figure (NF) with a common‐gate input stage and three pseudodifferential common‐source stages. Optimized transistor layout and capacitor neutralization technique are developed to improve gain and noise performance. Transformer‐based matching networks with the peak‐staggered technique are adopted in the LNA to achieve a flatter gain response with a wider bandwidth (BW). The passive double‐balanced mixers are implemented with a highly symmetrical layout for broadband down‐conversion. Simulation results show that the mm‐Wave RX front‐end exhibits a BW ranging from 90 to 115 GHz. The simulated NF of our RX is 4.7 dB at 86 GHz. With a supply voltage of 1 V, the presented RX consumes 88.2‐mW power and occupies a chip size of 1.6 × 0.5 mm 2 including all the testing pads. The proposed RX is suitable for W‐band imaging systems.