Alternative Millimeter-Wave Communication Receivers in Six-Port Technology

The six-port technology, originally used to perform complex reflection coefficient measurements of a microwave device, is an excellent candidate for the future millimeter-wave wireless communication systems. The millimeter-wave frequency conversion is performed using a passive circuit, the six-port, avoiding the conventional millimeter-wave active costly mixers. Basically, the six-port circuit is an additive mixer in which the resulting sum of millimeter-wave signals is nonlinearly processed using millimeter-wave detectors. A new V-band six-port circuit designed in MHMIC technology is presented in this paper. The operating principle of the proposed heterodyne receiver and demodulation results of V-band high-speed MPSK/QAM signals are presented and discussed. According to high-speed requirements of the IEEE 802.15.3.c wireless standard (100-400 Mb/s), the IF of this receiver was chosen at 900 MHz. A second frequency conversion using conventional means is used. Initial results show more that 70 dB of overall gain of the six-port heterodyne receiver