Abstract
A reformed particle swarm optimization (R(PSO))-based up-conversion mixer circuit is proposed for radar application in this paper. In practice, a non-optimized up-conversion mixer suffers from high power consumption, poor linearity, and conversion gain. Therefore, the R(PSO) algorithm is proposed to optimize the up-conversion mixer. The novelty of the proposed R(PSO) algorithm is it helps to solve the problem of local optima and premature convergence in traditional particle swarm optimization (T(PSO)). Furthermore, in the R(PSO), a velocity position-based convergence (VP(C)) and wavelet mutation (W(M)) strategy are used to enhance R(PSO)'s swarm diversity. Moreover, this work also features novel circuit configurations based on the two-fold transconductance path (T(TP)), a technique used to improve linearity. A differential common source (D(CS)) amplifier is included in the primary transconductance path (P(TP)) of the T(TP). As for the subsidiary transconductance path (S(TP)), the enhanced cross-quad transconductor (E(CQT)) is implemented within the T(TP). A benchmark function verification is conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the R(PSO) algorithm. The proposed R(PSO) has also been compared with other optimization algorithms such as the genetic algorithm (GA) and the non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm II (NSGA-II). By using R(PSO), the proposed optimized mixer achieves a conversion gain (CG) of 2.5 dB (measured). In this study, the proposed mixer achieves a 1 dB compression point (OP(1)dB) of 4.2 dBm with a high linearity. In the proposed mixer, the noise figure (NF) is approximately 3.1 dB. While the power dissipation of the optimized mixer is 3.24 mW. Additionally, the average time for R(PSO) to design an up-conversion mixer is 4.535 s. Simulation and measured results demonstrate the excellent performance of the R(PSO) optimized up-conversion mixer.