An 89 GHz single-balanced mixer design in 1 um InP DHBT technology

This paper demonstrates an active single-balanced mixer with InP double heterojunction bipolar transistor (DHBT) process for direct down-conversion system at 89 GHz. Authors use Coplanar Waveguide (CPW) as on-chip transmission line and tune an on-chip CPW balun to allocate LO signal to the switch cell. Benefiting from its balanced structure, this mixer shows a LO port to RF port isolation above 20 dB in all W-band. Its conversion gain is up to 3 dB with a 3 dB RF bandwidth more than 10 GHz. With a 10 dBm LO signal, the RF input 1 dB compression point is higher than -4 dBm around 89 GHz. This mixer consumes 340 mW power with a +4 V supply. All wafers have been thinned to 100 um before measurements.