Design of the RF pre-amplification distributed microwave MESFET mixer

A broadband distributed mixer with RF preamplification is presented. By employing uniform artificial transmission lines with pre-amplifier stage, the proposed mixer provides broadband characteristics at high microwave frequencies with maintaining high conversion gain and low DC power consumption. With a local oscillator power of 10 dBm، and RF power of -20 dBm, the proposed mixer has a conversion gain of 11 dB (without IF signal amplification), noise figure of 7-14 dB and 85 mW DC power consumption over a broadband frequencies from 2 to 11 GHz. Mixer operation is shown for both downconversion to fixed IF and broadband conversion using fixed LO frequencies. This mixer utilizes a simple distributed topology with MESFET and achieves a vary broadband performance comparable to that of the cascade or comparable to that of the cascade or dual-gate distributed mixers.