A BROADBAND DOUBLY BALANCED MONOLITHIC RING MIXER WITH A COMPACT INTERMEDIATE FREQUENCY (IF) EXTRACTION

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 0.15m GaAs pHEMT process is presented. A miniature Marchand-like spiral balun with low-pass fllter is used to extract IF signals and maintain balun performance simultaneously. The low-pass fllter can fllter 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 Ka- band applications. Subsequently, the LO/RF-to-IF isolations are greater than 43.2 and 32dB from 11 to 40GHz, respectively. The LO-to-RF isolation is between 26.9 and 50.7dB within the same swept range. The conversion loss is 7.2{12.4dB within the operating bandwidth.