A W-band subharmonically pumped monolithic GaAs-based HEMT gate mixer

Abstract

A W-band high electron mobility transistor (HEMT) subharmonically pumped (SHP) gate mixer is designed with fixed LO frequency operation. it is fabricated on a 4-mil substrate using 0.15-μm GaAs pHEMT monolithic microwave integrated circuit (MMIC) process. the on-wafer measurement results show that the best conversion loss is about 4.7 dB in the W-band, as a 11-dbm 42-GHz low observable (LO) signal is pumped. To our knowledge, this is the first result on low conversion-loss W-band MMIC SHP HEMT gate mixer.