A Low-Spurious E-Band GaAs MMIC Frequency Converter for Over-Gbps Wireless Communication

A highly integrated, low-spurious E-band MMIC frequency converter, which comprises a sub-harmonic mixer with an LO multiplier and a carrier driver, is presented. An APDP (Anti-Parallel Diode Pair) is used to the mixer and the multiplier so as to prevent a carrier leakage and the 2nd harmonic of an input LO, respectively. Several filters are also applied to suppress some spurious signals from the circuits. An MMIC is fabricated in 0.13um GaAs pHEMT technology, and measurement results show that a ratio between the desired carrier and the other spurious signals is as high as > 50 dB, and that the mixer has conversion loss of <; 12 dB and carrier-RF isolation of > 51 dB. Furthermore, the fabricated MMIC is applied to E-band equipment, where 1.2Gbps 64QAM wireless communication with 250MHz bandwidth (spectral efficiency of 4.8 bit/s/Hz) is achieved.