Monolithic Artificial Transmission Line Balanced Frequency Doublers

Artificial transmission lines, realized using standard passive components of the foundry library, were utilized to design 180-degree baluns for millimetre wave frequency doublers. Monolithic integration of the complete doubler was achieved on extremely small chip area, 0.6mm2. However, the performance of the frequency doubler was not sacrificed, since the operating frequency bandwidth was 30 %. These results show the suitability of this new technique for integration of several of the functions of a transmit/receive unit economically on a very small area on chip.