Abstract-To meet the requirements for broadband operation, high port-to-port isolation, and miniature chip area, a doubly balanced monolithic microwave ring mixer with an advanced IF extraction fabricated using 0.15 µm GaAs pHEMT process is presented. A miniature Marchand-like spiral balun with low-pass filter is used to extract IF signals and maintain balun performance simultaneously. The low-pass filter can filter out both the RF and LO signals. This miniaturized mixer design can mitigate layout complexity, improve port-to-port isolations suitable for ultra-broadband Ku-, K-, and Kaband applications. Subsequently, the LO/RF-to-IF isolations are greater than 43.2 and 32 dB from 11 to 40 GHz, respectively. The LO-to-RF isolation is between 26.9 and 50.7 dB within the same swept range. The conversion loss is 7.2-12.4 dB within the operating bandwidth.
A novel 21-35 GHz single-balanced quadruple subharmonic monolithic passive mixer is fabricated using the 0.15 µm GaAs pHEMT process. This mixer consists of a local oscillation (LO) spiral balun and a radio frequency (RF) band pass filter which has an intermediate frequency (IF) extracted feature utilizing a pair of anti-parallel Schottky barrier diode to achieve quadruple subharmonic mixing mechanism. The RF band pass filter formed with an interdigital coupler and a low-pass network is used to reduce the chip dimension while operating at a low frequency band and to improve the isolation between the RF and IF ports with a broadband operation. From the measured results, the mixer exhibits 11.3-15.1 dB conversion loss, 28.8 dB-high RF-to-IF isolation, 40 dB-high LO-to-RF isolation, 60 dB-high 3LOto-RF isolation over a 21-35 GHz RF bandwidth, and an input 1 dB compression power of 4 dBm. The compact IF extraction circuit supports an IF frequency ranging from DC to 3.1 GHz. The core chip size is only 0.67 × 0.75 mm 2 .
A doubly balanced monolithic microwave passive mixer using novel configurations is designed and fabricated through a 0.15 µm GaAs pHEMT process. The configuration of the doubly balanced mixer (DBM) can eliminate the use of two dual baluns for application in the conventional star mixer, as well as make the mixer more compact and simplify IF extraction to obtain wider IF bandwidth up to 15 GHz. From the measured results, the fabricated DBM exhibits wideband performance, superior isolations and high dynamic range.
Abstract-A broadband monolithic image rejection subharmonic mixer using a standard 0.18 µm CMOS technology is proposed. This circuit is composed of a band-pass filter with an intermediate frequency (IF) extraction function that can simplify the block diagram of the image rejection mixer. The entire passive circuit is constructed using a broadside coupling structure to achieve a high level of integration. Based on measured results, the proposed mixer exhibits conversion loss of 15.5-18.5 dB at a local oscillator (LO) power of 13 dBm, whereas the 3 dB bandwidth ranges from 20 to 31 GHz (43.1%) with a miniature chip dimension of 0.77 × 0.81 mm 2 . The LO-to-radio frequency (RF), 2LO-to-RF, and RF-to-IF isolation levels are higher than 22.5, 42.9, and 34.5 dB, respectively. The best image rejection ratio of 29 dBc with 20 • phase compensation at 24.5 GHz can be achieved.
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