A passive, power-efficient double-quadrature down converter for sliding IF-architectures.

• Applicant: Professor Dr.-Ing. Stefan Heinen
• Subject Area: Electronic Semiconductors, Components and Circuits, Integrated Systems, Sensor Technology, Theoretical Electrical Engineering
• Term: from 2016 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 299308907

The frequency conversion process of modern wireless transceivers is the bottleneck of the overall system performance and power consumption. Especially, for short range wireless communications such as sensor networks, medical applications and other cyber physical systems, power consumption requirements are strict. The sliding-IF architecture provides a very promising ability of reducing the transceiver power consumption and enhancing the system performance due to its relaxed requirement for frequency synthesizer and the high frequency drivers used for the mixer. Also the sliding- IF architecture is very often used in commercial WLAN transceivers. In this propose, two novel variants of passive mixers are presented. The frequency conversion is performed in the complex-domain. The first variant is advantageous for low power consumption due to the complex-domain frequency mixing being only executed in the second mixer stage. On the other hand, the conversion losses of this variant is relatively high. The second variant provides a fully complex frequency conversion which means both first and second mixer stages are operating in complex-domain, resulting in a completely image rejection. Therefore, compared to state of the art technology the novel passive quadrature sliding-IF mixer can offer significantly less conversion losses and low noise figure.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants