Design of a wideband down-conversion mixer in X-band

In this paper, a wideband single balanced down-conversion diode based passive mixer is presented. RF bandwidth of this single balanced mixer is made wider with the help of two section BLC and double stub matching. The mixer has high RF sensitivity up to −90 dBm. The mixer down-converts the RF band 9.2–10.5 GHz to 1.3–2.6 GHz. A prototype is fabricated and tested. It provides measured average conversion loss of 10 dB over the entire RF bandwidth at an optimum LO power of 13 dBm with measured IP1 of −1.6 dBm. Over the band, RF-LO isolation is at least 30 dB.