A 78-114 GHz monolithic subharmonically pumped GaAs-based HEMT diode mixer

A W-band subharmonically pumped (SHP) diode mixer is designed for fixed LO frequency operation. It is fabricated on a 4-mil substrate using 0.15 μm GaAs PHEMT MMIC process. The on-wafer measurement results show that the conversion loss is about 10 to 14 dB across the W band, as a 10 dBm 48 GHz LO signal is pumped. To our knowledge, this is the state-of-the-art result on low-conversion-loss wideband MMIC SHP diode mixer. The packaged module measurement shows a similar result. Both the simulation and measurement results are shown to be in good agreement.