A Simple Method for Millimeter-Wave Finline Balanced Mixer Design Using Three-Dimensional Field Simulation Software

Abstract

In this paper, a simple method for millimeter-wave finline balanced mixer design using three-dimensional field simulation software has been proposed. The method can be widely used to design the diode-based circuits, especially for the circuit structures with orthogonal field in some specific hybrid integrated circuits which are unavailable to be designed using the circuit simulator. In these circuits, the power directly at diodes is correlated to the input reflection coefficient. The diodes mounted on the finline circuits are defined as impedance boundary in the commercial computer-aided design (CAD) tool High Frequency Structure Simulator (HFSS) model, and hence simulation with the use of HFSS can be implemented to optimize the input matching network of the finline circuits for transferring maximum power to the diodes. Two finline balanced mixers at U-band using commercial GaAs Schottky diodes have been designed and fabricated to validate this method. Matching structures at the radio frequency (RF) port have been employed for a better return loss and a lower conversion loss. Experiment results are presented and show good agreement with simulation data. The proposed method has proven to be useful for the design of millimeter-wave mixers in finline technique.