A wideband GaAs double-balanced mixer and driver amplifier MMIC

A wideband GaAs MMIC double-balanced mixer working at 7-14GHz is designed in this paper on the 0.25μm GaAs pHEMT process. The range of radio frequency (RF) / local oscillator (LO) is from 7 to 14GHz and the intermediate frequency (IF) is from DC to 3GHz. The ring diode is used in the mixer, and the new type of Marchand balun is applied to the RF and LO ports of the designed mixer respectively to diminish the chip area. In order to ensure the performance of the doublebalanced mixer, a power driven amplifier is designed to drive the LO signal. Simulated results shows that when the power of LO port is 13dBm, the conversion loss of the double-balanced mixer is less than 10dB, the isolation of LO to RF is over 30dB, and VSWR of LO port and RF port is less than 2 and 2.8 respectively. The total area of the proposed mixer is 1.5 mm × 1.0 mm.