Uniplanar balanced subharmonically pumped mixer for low-cost broadband millimeter-wave system design

A new uniplanar architecture of subharmonically pumped balanced mixer is proposed and developed for low-cost broadband design of a millimeter-wave transceiver. Our theoretical and experimental studies carried out over Ka-band show that the new mixer has a conversion loss comparable to the conventional balanced fundamental harmonic mixer. They demonstrate, on the other hand, unparalleled advantages such as very high isolation between ports, wide operating bandwidth, excellent suppression of unwanted LO/RF harmonics and mixing signal components, and also less demand on the LO source