Millimeter-Wave Downconverter with Subharmonic Pump

Hybrid integrated downconverters which are pumped at half the frequency needed in a conventional downconverter have shown a conversion loss of 3 dB and a SSB receiver noise figure of 6.7 dB at 50 GHz. Each downconverter circuit consists of a stripline conductor pattern, a novel transition from waveguide to stripline and a Schottky barrier diode pair. The circuits can be tuned over an RF bandwidth of 20 GHz, and they can be readily scaled to frequencies up to 100 GHz.