An Integrated mm-Wave Quadrature Up-Conversion Mixer Based on a Six-Port Modulator

Abstract

A quadrature up-conversion mixer for low-power wireless communication systems is presented. The circuit is based on a six-port junction with reflective loads to modulate a carrier signal at 190 GHz. While most of the previously published six-port up-conversion mixers were fabricated on ceramic substrates and use discrete III–V semiconductors as reflective loads, this circuit uses common-base stages integrated with the six-port junction on a single chip. The circuit was fabricated in a SiGe BiCMOS process and a conversion gain of –3 dB is measured with –10.3 dBm of power from a local oscillator and 36.5 mW of dc power. The –3 dB bandwidth in the baseband is 17 GHz. To the best knowledge of the authors, this is the first demonstration of an integrated six-port up-conversion mixer operating at mm-wave frequencies.