A variable gain reconfigurable mixer using gallium nitride high‐electron‐mobility transistor for wireless local area network applications

Abstract

Summary In this paper, a design of reconfigurable frequency mixer is adapted with gallium nitride high‐electron‐mobility transistor (GaN HEMT) architecture under variable gain, different intermediate frequency (IF) bandwidth, and active/passive configuration for multidisciplinary applications supported by wireless local area network (WLAN) framework. The low band (LB) and high band (HB) are reconfigured by shunting the power between the switching and transconductance at the IF stage of the transistor. The transistor switching mode (active and passive) and logic levels are fixed at the input stage, and the input radio frequency (RF) signal is steering between the gate and drain terminals of transistors. The transistor gain is controlled by adjusting transconductance at the input RF stage and the current‐steering in transimpedance stage at the output. The simulation results show that the proposed circuit provides variable gain of 23/25 and 30/32 dB and noise figure of 14.5/12.5 at the LB and HB reconfigurable scenarios. Hence, it is suitable for transceiver optimistic functions with converge large bandwidth through shunting stages of reconfigurable frequency mixer and transconductance.