Millimeter-wave wireless communication systems integrated with a novel receiver front-end

In this paper, a novel Ka-band receiver front-end that integrates a substrate integrated waveguide based slot array antenna, a band-pass filter and a second-harmonic self-oscillating mixer, is presented as an effort to establish a compact, low-cost and low profile architecture for millimetre-wave wireless systems. Our proposed self-oscillating mixer makes use of the transmission characteristics of two operating modes in a substrate integrated waveguide cavity. As such, the proposed receiver front-end has the advantages of low phase noise and decent isolation between radio frequency (RF) and local oscillator (LO) signals. This paper further presents a Ka-band transceiver system in order to verify the feasibility of our receiver front-end for practical wireless communication applications. Satisfactory results have been obtained.