A Broadband Doubly Balanced Monolithic Ring Mixer With a Compact Intermediate Frequency (If) Extraction

Abstract

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 38 to 44 GHZ Sub-Harmonic Balanced HBT Mixer With Integrated Miniature Spiral Type Marchand Balun

“…The balun consists of two offset broadside coupled spiral transformers. Contrary to most other reported miniature spiral type Marchand balun designs, e.g., [11][12][13][14][15][16][17], our design adds five shunt capacitors externally to the spiral transformer structures. The lumped element equivalent circuit model of the spiral type Marchand balun configured as a symmetrical four port network is shown in Fig.…”

New Non-Linear Approach for the Evaluation of the Linearity of High Gain Harmonic Self Oscillating Mixers

“…In order to analyze the linearity of the HSOM working as a mixer, the two figures of merit which are commonly used to characterize conventional amplifiers [8-10, 26, 27], and mixers [13,15,17,28], namely, the 1 dB compression point and the third order interception point (IP3), will be calculated. In addition, an in-depth study of the influence of the harmonic content and the operating regime of the circuit on the linearity of the mixing operation will be performed.…”

“…As in any amplifier [8][9][10], mixer [11][12][13][14][15][16][17], or active antenna with mixing capabilities [18], noise behavior [11,12] and IF signal distortion [13,18] are key factors that must be rigorously analyzed and minimized. In this work, it will be shown that the figures of merit which are traditionally used to analyze the linearity of conventional mixers cannot be directly applied to an autonomous circuit like the HSOM, because of the influence of the input RF signal power on the parameters of the self-oscillating signal.…”

Planar W-Band Mixer With a Novel if-Block

“…With the rapidly growing demand for military and commercial applications, it has become increasingly important territory to be explored [1]. Compared to the waveguide structure mixers [2,3], planar integrated technology has received considerable attention because of low cost (hybrid integrated circuit) and high performance (monolithic integrated circuit), especially in millimeter-wave bands [4][5][6].…”