Ka/Ku-Band pHEMT Gilbert Mixers With Polyphase and Coupled-Line Quadrature Generators

Abstract

In this paper, three kinds of Ka/Ku-band Gilbert mixers are demonstrated using 0.15-mu m AlGaAs/InGaAs pseudomorphic high electron mobility transistor technology. Thanks to the semiinsulating GaAs substrate, microwave passive components have a low-loss feature, and polyphase filters work up to higher frequencies. Highly accurate tantalum-nitride thin-film resistors utilized in polyphase filters result in perfect quadrature operation. Therefore, our proposed single-sideband up-converter operates at 15 GHz with a 63-dB sideband rejection ratio, and another 34-GHz in-phase/quadrature (I/Q) subharmonic down-converter reaches <0.4-dB magnitude and < 1 degrees phase errors. More than 50-dB local oscillator (LO) leakage suppression is achieved in the I/Q subharmonic mixer. On the other hand, a 40-GHz stacked-LO subharmonic mixer with a novel compensation technique is also proposed and demonstrated to improve LO speed and reduce the amount of transistors, as compared to previous work.