A Cell-Based Wideband Monolithic Upconverter

A fully monolithic wideband upconverter has been developed and tested using a cell-based design approach. This upconverter consists of an RF amplifier cell, a broadband diode mixer cell, and an LO buffer amplifier cell. The chip (48 × 96 mils) has been tested at different LO frequencies between 9 and 14 GHz with a swept IF from 300 MHz to 1 GHz, and typically has 2 dB of conversion loss for upconverted output across the 8 to 15 GHz band. It has 4.8 dBm of output, 1 dB compression power at 10 GHz LO (with only 4 dBm of LO Power), and 1 GHz input frequency.