Design and Performance of a 45-GHz HEMT Mixer

A 45-GHz single-ended HEMT mixer has been developed with unity gain and 7-8-dB SSB noise figure over a 2-GHz bandwidth, including an IF amplifier, and 2-dBm output intermodulation intercept. This paper describes its design, structure, and performance. High performance has been achieved by careful attention to the design of the input and output embedding networks. This is the first reported HEMT mixer and the first active mixer above 30 GHz.