An InP HBT sub-harmonic mixer for E-band wireless communication

This paper reports on a novel balanced HBT sub-harmonic mixer (SHM) for E-band wireless communication. An LO spiral type Marchand balun is integrated with the SHM. The SHM has been fabricated in a InP double heterojunction bipolar transistor (DHBT) circuit-oriented technology with f
_T
/fmax = 180GHz/200GHz. The measured results demonstrates a conversion loss of 4.5 dB at an RF frequency of 73.5 GHz with an associated LO power of 5 dBm. The conversion loss is better than 10 dB in the frequency range from 67 GHz to 81 GHz. The DC power consumption of the SHM is only 46mW under normal operation.