A millimetre-wave monolithic balanced mixer

A wideband, small size, low cost, monolithic mixer with bias has been designed and made which exhibits low noise figure and conversion loss. The facility for applying bias has reduced the local oscillator power requirement for low conversion loss, this enables a low-cost FET dielectric resonator oscillator producing less than 10 dBm to be used as the local oscillator. These mixers are currently providing service to participants in a demonstration system and have thus fulfilled the purpose of demonstrating the feasibility of using monolithic technology at 28 GHz. Monolithic integration is considered essential to meet low-cost targets in volume and the chip area has been restricted for this reason. Currently, a 1-2 GHz IF amplifier is being integrated onto the same chip as the mixer