A compact D-band monolithic APDP-based sub-harmonic mixer

The paper presents a compact D-band monolithic sub-harmonic mixer (SHM) with 3 mu m planar hyperabrupt schottky-varactor diodes offered by 70 nm GaAs mHEMT technology. According to empirical equivalent-circuit models, a wide-band large signal equivalent circuit model of the diode is proposed. Based on the extracted model, the mixer is implemented and optimized with a shunt-mounted antiparallel diode pair (APDP) to fulfill the sub-harmonic mixing mechanism. Furthermore, a modified asymmetric three-transmission-line coupler is devised to achieve high-level coupling and minimize the chip size. The measured results show that the conversion gain varies between -13.9 dB and -17.5 dB from 110 GHz to 145 GHz, with a local oscillator (LO) power level of 14 dBm and an intermediate frequency (IF) of 1 GHz. The total chip size including probe GSG pads is 0.57 x 0.68 mm(2). In conclusion, the mixer exhibits outstanding figure-of-merits. (C) 2017 Published by Elsevier Ltd.