A W-band high conversion gain, single-balanced subharmonically gate-pumped mixer with novel size-reduced marchand balun

A W-band single balanced subharmonically pumped gate mixer is presented. For a compact design, the compensated capacitors, redundant line and open stub have been implemented in the proposed novel Marchand balun to reduce the balun size to a half of the conventional Marchand balun. With a 6dBm LO power, the peak measured conversion gain of -2dB was observed and a 3dB bandwidth of 15GHz from 83 to 98GHz was achieved. The variation of conversion gain was less than 1dB from the IF frequency of 1 to 7GHz. The port-to-port isolations were all better than 35dB with chip size of 1.4×0.8 mm².