title: Double-Balanced Graphene Integrated Mixer with Outstanding Linearity.
abstract: A monolithic double-balanced graphene mixer integrated circuit (IC) has been successfully designed and fabricated. The IC adopted the cross-coupled resistive mixer topology, integrating four 500 nm-gate-length graphene field-effect transistors (GFETs), four on-chip inductors, and four on-chip capacitors. Passive-first-active-last fabrication flow was developed on 200 mm CMOS wafers. CMOS back-end-of-line processes were utilized to realize most fabrication steps followed by GFET-customized processes. Test results show excellent output spectrum purity with suppressed radio frequency (RF) and local oscillation (LO) signals feedthroughs, and third-order input intercept (IIP3) reaches as high as 21 dBm. The results are compared with a fabricated single-GEFT mixer, which generates IIP3 of 16.5 dBm. Stand-alone 500 nm-gate-length GFETs feature cutoff frequency 22 GHz and maximum oscillation frequency 20.7 GHz RF performance. The double-balanced mixer IC operated with off-chip baluns realizing a print-circuit-board level electronic system. It demonstrates graphene's potential to compete with other semiconductor technologies in RF front-end applications.
authors.affiliation: Institute of Microelectronics, Tsinghua University , Beijing, China 100084.
authors.forename: Hongming
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Lyu
authors.affiliation: Institute of Microelectronics, Tsinghua University , Beijing, China 100084.|Tsinghua National Laboratory for Information Science and Technology (TNList) , Beijing, China , 100084.
authors.forename: Huaqiang
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Wu
authors.affiliation: Institute of Microelectronics, Chinese Academy of Sciences , Haidian District, Beijing, China 100029.
authors.forename: Jinbiao
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.affiliation: Institute of Microelectronics, Tsinghua University , Beijing, China 100084.
authors.forename: Qi
authors.initials: Q
authors.lastname: Lu
authors.affiliation: Institute of Microelectronics, Tsinghua University , Beijing, China 100084.
authors.forename: Jinyu
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.affiliation: Institute of Microelectronics, Tsinghua University , Beijing, China 100084.
authors.forename: Xiaoming
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Wu
authors.affiliation: Institute of Microelectronics, Chinese Academy of Sciences , Haidian District, Beijing, China 100029.
authors.forename: Junfeng
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Li
authors.affiliation: Shenyang National Laboratory for Materials Science, Institute of Metal Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences , Shenyang, China , 110016.
authors.forename: Teng
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Ma
authors.affiliation: Institute of Microelectronics, Chinese Academy of Sciences , Haidian District, Beijing, China 100029.
authors.forename: Jiebin
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Niu
authors.affiliation: Shenyang National Laboratory for Materials Science, Institute of Metal Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences , Shenyang, China , 110016.
authors.forename: Wencai
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Ren
authors.affiliation: Shenyang National Laboratory for Materials Science, Institute of Metal Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences , Shenyang, China , 110016.
authors.forename: Huiming
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Cheng
authors.affiliation: Institute of Microelectronics, Tsinghua University , Beijing, China 100084.
authors.forename: Zhiping
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Yu
authors.affiliation: Institute of Microelectronics, Tsinghua University , Beijing, China 100084.|Tsinghua National Laboratory for Information Science and Technology (TNList) , Beijing, China , 100084.
authors.forename: He
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Qian
keywords: Graphene; RF electronics; integrated circuit; mixer