Design of a space grade KU * X band mixer using MMIC technology

This project briefs Design of Ku x X band Mixer design using MMIC technology.It comes as second stage in satellite receiver. To meet the requirements of the design, a double balanced cold FET topology is selected.The Mixer is designed using 130nm GaAs pHEMT process from OMMIC foundry. The RF signal from 12- 14.5 GHz is feed to Mixing cell through Marchand balun and the LO signal of 1.3 GHz through active balun.In order to reduce the size and meet the LO power requirement of 5-6 dbm, di erential ampli er based active balun is designed. The three coupled line Marchand balun is designed to reduce the insertion loss of balun. The IF signal extracted using IF balun is from 10.7-13.2 GHz range. The design has conversion loss of around 8.5 dBm over entire band of 2.5 GHz, inband spurious of >60dBc at input level of -30dBm and two tone third order IMD of >40dBc at -33dBm carrier level. The size of the entire chip is 3 x 1.5 mm.