Abstract
Abstract Declining reserves of easily accessible natural resources have motivated the oil and gas industry to drill deeper. Temperatures in these hostile wells can exceed 210 °C. Cooling and conventional heat extraction techniques are impractical in such a harsh environment. Reliable electronic designs that can sustain high temperature become necessary. This paper presents a high temperature passive RF mixer that is suited for downhole communications. The proposed mixer is designed to upconvert or downconvert the incoming signal with a low conversion loss (CL) and high linearity and reliable operation at temperature up to 250 °C. Gallium Nitride (GaN) is a wide band gap technology that can provide a reliable operation at the elevated ambient temperature, and the proposed mixer adopts a commercial GaN high electron mobility transistor (HEMT) technology. Measurement results indicate that the proposed mixer achieves CL of 6.5 dB at LO power of 2.5 dBm for the downconversion from 230–253 MHz to 97.5 MHz at 250 °C and input P1dB compression point lies at 5 dBm. The power dissipation of the mixer is virtually zero.
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