A W-band GCPW MMIC Diode Tripler

A W-band GCPW (grounded coplanar waveguide) MMIC diode tripler using GaAs PHEMT process is developed. An anti-parallel diode pair is used to produce third harmonic signal and a GCPW band pass filter is used to reject the spurious signal. The measured conversion loss is 18-20 dB from 87 to 102 GHz at 14-dBm input power. It is observed that if the filter were taken out, this tripler could be improved more than 5-dB in conversion loss without significant affecting in rejection performance. In this case, the chip could be reduced at least by half to a miniature size, that is, from 1.5 x 1 mm2 to about 0.8 x 0.8 mm2.