Broadband Millimeter-Wave Single Balanced Mixer and Its Applications to Substrate Integrated Wireless Systems

This paper presents an innovative broadband millimeter-wave single balanced diode mixer that makes use of a substrate integrated waveguide (SIW)-based 180 hybrid. It has low conversion loss of less than 10 dB, excellent linearity, and high port-to-port isolations over a wide frequency range of 20 to 26 GHz. The proposed mixer has advantages over previously reported millimeter-wave mixer structures judging from a series of aspects such as cost, ease of fabrication, planar construction, and broadband performance. Furthermore, a receiver front-end that integrates a high-performance SIW slot-array antenna and our proposed mixer is introduced. Based on our proposed receiver front-end structure, a K-band wireless communication system with M-ary quadrature amplitude modulation is developed and demonstrated for line-of-sight channels. Excellent overall error vector magnitude performance has been obtained.