A Silicon Balanced Subharmonic Optoelectronic Mixer for 60-GHz Fiber-Wireless Downlink Application

We demonstrate a 60-GHz fiber-wireless downlink using a balanced subharmonic optoelectronic mixer based on a silicon avalanche photodiode (APD) pair fabricated with standard 0.25-μm bipolar complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor technology. Conversion efficiency of this new type of optoelectronic mixer is 11 dB better than that of the previously reported single APD mixer. We achieve downlink transmission of 25-Mb/s 32 quadrature-amplitude modulation data with the minimum error-vector magnitude of 2.4%.