A W-Band Up-Conversion Mixer with Integrated LO Frequency Doublers in a 60 nm GaN Technology

A W-band up-conversion mixer with integrated frequency doublers is designed and manufactured in a 60 nm GaN-on-Si technology. The mixer is a single-balanced transconductance mixer. Via a 90
⁰
hybrid, the single-ended LO signal is split into I/Q signals fed separately to two frequency doublers, generating differential 2 ×LO signals. The circuit is characterized by on-chip probing. The measured lowest conversion loss is 6.4 dB. The 3-dB RF bandwidth is 8 GHz from 87.5 to 95.5 GHz and the 3-dB IF bandwidth is 4.0 GHz from 0.1 to 4.1 GHz. The output referred P1dB is -8.5 dBm at 93 GHz RF frequency. The input power (LO) of the doubler is 17 dBm. The total DC power consumption of the mixer and the doublers is 620 mW. To the best of authors’ knowledge, the mixer achieves the lowest conversion loss among the E/W-band GaN mixers published in the literature.