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

现代无线收发器的频率转换过程是整个系统性能和功耗的瓶颈。特别是，对于诸如传感器网络、医疗应用和其他网络物理系统的短距离无线通信，功耗要求是严格的。滑动中频结构由于其对频率合成器和混频器所用高频驱动器的要求较低，因此在降低收发机功耗和提高系统性能方面具有很大的潜力。 此外，滑动中频架构也经常用于商用无线局域网收发器。 在这个提议中，提出了两个新的变体的无源混频器。频率转换在复域中执行。由于仅在第二混频器级中执行复域混频，第一变型对于低功耗是有利的。 另一方面，该变型的转换损耗相对较高。第二变型提供全复频率转换，这意味着第一和第二混频器级都在复域中操作，从而导致完全镜像抑制。因此，与现有技术相比，新型无源正交滑动中频混频器可以提供显著更少的转换损耗和低噪声系数。

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.