A Q-band miniature monolithic subharmonically pumped resistive mixer

Abstract

This paper proposes a miniature Q-band monolithic subharmonically pumped resistivemixer, consisting of two pHEMT transistors, a LOreduced-size Marchand balun and RF/IF filters. Thecompact RF/IF diplex circuit and a reduced-sizebalun were used to minimize the chip size whichresults only 0.72 mm 2 . Besides, 5 dBm LO inputpower is needed which is one-third of othersubharmonically pumped mixers with more than 10dBm LO power. This mixer exhibits 12.5 � 1.5 dBup-conversion loss and 12 � 1 dB down-conversionloss with 5 dBm LO input power. Up-conversion 1-dB compression output power is -15dBm and down-conversion 1-dB compression output power is -12dBm. To our knowledge, this mixer has goodconversion with smallest chip size and minimum LOinput power.