A new transmission line structure is presented in this work for advanced CMOS processes. This structure has a high quality factor and low attenuation. It allows slow-waves to propagate which results in low dispersion for a given characteristic impedance. It is also designed to satisfy the stringent density requirements of advanced CMOS processes. A model is developed to characterize this structure by analyzing the physical current flowing in the substrate and the shield structure. Test structures were fabricated using CMOS 90 nm process technology with measurements made up to 110 GHz using a transmission-reflection module on a network analyzer. The results correspond well to the proposed model.

A fully integrated broadband up-conversion mixer with low power consumption is demonstrated on 90 nm CMOS technology in this paper. This mixer has a single-ended input and a multi-layer stacked Marchand balun is used for converting the differential output of the single-balanced mixer topology to a single-ended output. This balun employs inductive coupling between two metal layers and includes slotted shields to reduce substrate losses. The circuit size is 650 µm570 µm. At 22.1 GHz, the integrated mixer achieves a conversion gain of 2 dB with a maximum power dissipation of only 11.1 mW from a 1.2 V dc power supply at LO power of 5 dBm. Input referred 1-dB compression point is -14.8 dBm. The LO and RF return loss are better than 10 dB for frequencies between 20-26 GHz.