A 5-GHz frequency-doubling quadrature modulator with a ring-type local oscillator

The direct-conversion quadrature modulator described here was developed by using a frequency-doubling circuit technique so that the modulator and the local oscillator can be integrated on a single silicon chip. The local oscillation frequency in the modulator can be reduced to half the carrier frequency, and this enables the integration on a single chip. A three-level mixer with a newly designed symmetrical topology for two local oscillator inputs is used for the frequency doubling, so the image component levels of the modulated signals are low. When the modulator was implemented on a single chip by using Si-bipolar process technology with a cutoff frequency of 40 GHz, the image ratio at a carrier frequency of 5 GHz was less than -34 dBc.