Signal and noise improvement of travelling wave FET mixers

The influence of the loading of the FET electrodes, on signal and noise performances of the device in a mixer application is studied. It is shown that exciting the input signal from one end of the gate and extracting the output signal from the opposite ends of the gate can improve the device characteristics, provided that the two remaining ends of the gate and the drain are properly loaded. This structure makes the lines (i.e. the gate and the drain electrodes) matched with the loads. Therefore it leads to a travelling wave FET mixer, which is a good candidate for high power MM-wave application