A K-band single-chip transmitter

A very small K-band transmitter chip has been designed and fabricated for the first time. The transmitter chip contains a local oscillator, a balanced FET upconverter, and amplifiers. It converts 1-GHz IF signals up to 25 GHZ with a conversion gain of 10 dB and generates a maximum power of 10 dBm. Lumped-constant meander, spiral inductors, and high-impedance coplanar waveguides are used to reduce size. The chip is only 3.3 mm*1.3 mm due to effective uniplanar MMIC (monolithic microwave IC) design techniques and a simple local oscillator configuration.<>