An 11.5mW 12.3–14.5GHz Passive Mixer-First Receiver Front End Achieving 4.2dB NF and -5dBm B1dB

This work presents a low power, high dynamic range passive mixer-first receiver for the proposed 6G FR3 band. The proposed architecture achieves high performance at low power by directly driving the mixers with harmonically enhanced (HE) waveforms generated by a class F-1 quadrature oscillator. Additionally, an overlap suppression front-end (FE) network is implemented that enables a wide range of mixer biases for optimal performance resulting in a more robust design to process and voltage variations. The 12.3–14.5GHz prototype is implemented in a FinFet process exhibiting a 4.2dB noise figure (NF), -5dBm Blocker 1dB (B1dB) compression point, and 7.3dBm out-of-band (OOB) third-order input intercept point (IIP3) with a total power consumption of 11.5mW while occupying 0.28mm².