Switched Capacitor Mixer
Nikolaos Fotias
Abstract
There has been an increasing interest in all-digital architectures in the RFIC industry over the past few years, mainly due to the higher challenge in the design and the extra cost of fabrication of RF analog and mixed-signal ICs versus standard digital ones in modern nano-scale IC technologies. Digital circuit designs offer the advantages of portability, reconfigurability, automated checking and verification.This thesis proposes a mixer comprised of switched capacitor circuits, where the switches are driven by a digital frequency synthesizer offering the aforementioned advantages. Chapter 1 discusses the theory behind the proposed mixer while chapter 2 describes the design process with which the mixer was made, using the Cadence toolbox. Finally, Chapter 3 presents the results of the simulations that were contacted on the mixer.