Effect of active load on III-V NWFET Double-Balanced Gilbert Cells

Abstract: Abstract A center point in the transistor research is to find a successor to the silicon-based transistors that are mainly used in today’s industry. III-V Field Effect Transistors (FET) have been the transistor of choice for many researchers for a long time but other options are interesting as well. The aim of this thesis is to show what a mixer circuit based on Nanowire transistors can achieve when combined with active load and current bleeding techniques. The results achieved in the simulations show how the performance of almost all parameters like gain, noise factor and especially linearity improves. The final values reached was a gain of 4.28 dB, a low noise factor of 9.7 dB, IIP3 of 16.4 dBm and 1dB compression point of 0.17 dBm. The values the linearity reached were very high but they came with the price of an increased power consumption with a factor of five, 40 mW compared to 8.7 mW for the regular Nanowire mixer without the active load implemented. As the linearity was very good for this mixer at the outset, the improvements of the mixer are mainly in the wrong area making the increased power consumption a disadvantage in the usual case. The design could however still be useful in some specific cases where extreme linearity and low noise factor is of outmost importance.