Millimeter-Wave Integrated Circuit Design for Wireless and Radar Applications

This paper describes a quadrature voltage-controlled oscillator (QVCO), frequency doubler, and sub-harmonic mixer (SHM) for a millimeter-wave (mm-wave) front-end implemented in a high-speed InP DHBT technology. The QVCO exhibits large tuning range from 38 to 47.8 GHz with an output power around -15 dBm. The frequency doubler is based on a novel feedback network and demonstrates an output power of -11.5 dBm at an input frequency of 31.4 GHz. The SHM shows a maximum conversion gain at 45 GHz of 10.3 dB with an LO power of only 0 dBm. The mixer is broad-band with more than 7 dB conversion gain from 40-50 GHz. To the authors knowledge the QVCO, frequency doubler, and SHM presents the first mm-wave implementations of these circuits in InP DHBT technology