A Compact Broadband Monolithic Sub-Harmonic Mixer Using Multi-Line Coupler

Abstract

A compact broadband monolithic sub-harmonic mixer is presented in a 70 nm GaAs Technology for millimeter wave wireless communication application. The proposed mixer adopts a novel multi-line coupler structure; where the two-sided coupling energy of radio frequency (RF) and local oscillation (LO) signals are both collected and efficiently feed to anti-parallel diode pair (APDP) topology; resulting in broadband performance and compact chip size. As a comparison in the same circuit configuration; the five-line coupler can expand the bandwidth of the existing three-line coupler by 85% and reduce the area by 39.5% when the central frequency is 127 GHz. The measured conversion gain is −16.2 dB to −19.7 dB in a wide operation frequency band of 110–170 GHz. The whole chip size is 0.47 × 0.66 mm2 including test pads. The proposed mixer exhibits good figure-of-merits for D-band down-converter applications

MmWave Physical Layer Network Modeling and Planning for Fixed Wireless Access Applications

“…The design of a 48 GHz phase-locked loop for 60 GHz transceivers [ 31 ] is presented in the Special Issue on mmWave integrated circuits and systems for 5G applications [ 32 ]. This Special Issue also covers other design aspects of mmWave transceivers, including bandpass filter design [ 33 ], variable gain amplifiers [ 34 , 35 ], and mixers [ 36 ].…”