New Millimeter-wave Six-port Heterodyne Receiver Architecture

The modern communication receivers are more and more exigent in terms of wide-band, data rates, size and costs. Because conventional millimeter-wave receivers are limited in these aspects, alternative receivers have been explored in the past years. A new six-port receiver heterodyne architecture is proposed in this paper. The first frequency conversion is performed using a passive circuit, the six-port, avoiding the conventional millimeter-wave active costly mixer. The second frequency conversion uses conventional means due to the low IF value. This paper describes in detail the basic theory of the proposed receiver, including a discussion concerning the choice of power or magnitude RF detectors. In addition, demodulation results of a 100 Mb/s Ka-band QPSK signal are presented and discussed