30 GHz HTS Receiver Front-End Based on Monolithic Josephson Mixer

A compact, high-gain, and low-noise Ka band HTS Josephson junction-based receiver front-end module for wireless communication is presented in this paper. The front-end module consists of biasing circuits, a semiconductor low-noise amplifier, and a monolithic HTS circuit consisting of an Josephson mixer, bandpass and lowpass filters. The semiconductor LNA in the first stage is applied to achieve a low noise figure of the whole front-end module. Integration of the Josephson mixer with a number of HTS passive components on a single chip improves the coupling efficiency and reduces the connection losses between the components. The total dimension of the packaged front-end module is below 25 mm × 20 mm × 15 mm, which is very compact. Measurement result shows that the front-end module has an overall conversion gain around 40 dB, and a low noise figure close to 0 dB with an LO driving power around -38 dBm at 40 K.