Broadband Millimeter-Wave Single Balanced Mixer and Its Applications to Substrate Integrated Wireless Systems

Abstract

This paper presents an innovative broadband millimeter-wave single balanced diode mixer that makes use of a substrate integrated waveguide (SIW)-based 180 hybrid. It has low conversion loss of less than 10 dB, excellent linearity, and high port-to-port isolations over a wide frequency range of 20 to 26 GHz. The proposed mixer has advantages over previously reported millimeter-wave mixer structures judging from a series of aspects such as cost, ease of fabrication, planar construction, and broadband performance. Furthermore, a receiver front-end that integrates a high-performance SIW slot-array antenna and our proposed mixer is introduced. Based on our proposed receiver front-end structure, a -band wireless communication system with M-ary quadrature amplitude modulation is developed and demonstrated for line-of-sight channels. Excellent overall error vector magnitude performance has been obtained.Index Terms-Balanced mixer, broadband, error vector magnitude (EVM), millimeter-wave, 180 hybrid, phase shifter, receiver front-end, substrate integrated waveguide (SIW).

Design of A Compact Single-Balanced Mixer for UWB Applications

“…Table 1 summarizes the performance of the proposed mixer compared with those of some recently reported mixers. The proposed mixer clearly exhibits better overall performance than the previously published mixers [7][8][9][10], especially in term of conversion loss, size reduction, and bandwidth performance.…”

“…Various studies have been conducted to improve the bandwidth performance of the mixers [4][5][6][7][8][9][10]. To construct a balanced mixer, a well-designed broadband balun with inherent isolation, cancelation of local oscillator (LO) noise, low intermodulation products, and good conversion efficiency was reDesign of A Compact Single-Balanced Mixer for UWB Applications commended.…”

“…To construct a balanced mixer, a well-designed broadband balun with inherent isolation, cancelation of local oscillator (LO) noise, low intermodulation products, and good conversion efficiency was reDesign of A Compact Single-Balanced Mixer for UWB Applications commended. Broadband hybrid couplers as mixer baluns were implemented with a combination of different kinds of transmission lines, such as coplanar waveguide and slot line [5], Gilbert cell [6], substrate integrated waveguide (SIW) couplers [7,8], and multi-layer ring hybrid [9]. In [7,8], SIW couplers were utilized to design single-balanced mixers.…”

“…Broadband hybrid couplers as mixer baluns were implemented with a combination of different kinds of transmission lines, such as coplanar waveguide and slot line [5], Gilbert cell [6], substrate integrated waveguide (SIW) couplers [7,8], and multi-layer ring hybrid [9]. In [7,8], SIW couplers were utilized to design single-balanced mixers. However, these mixers with SIW couplers exhibited high conversion losses because of high leakage related to the required vias.…”

Single Balanced Monolithic Diode Mixer using Marchand Balun for Millimeter-wave Applications

“…Although millimeter-wave mixer techniques are well developed, the high performance monolithic mixer is still popular research topic. Especially, diode mixers with the single balanced configuration have been developed continuously [1][2][3][4] . Even though the single balanced diode mixers have several serious limitations, they are used in many millimeter-wave systems due to their advantages such as simplicity of circuit structure compared with double balanced configuration and good RF-to-LO isolation characteristics.…”