A High Performance Harmonic Mixer Using a plastic packaged device

In this paper, a third-order harmonic mixer is designed using frequency multiplier theory for the Ka-band. The gate bias voltage is selected by frequency multiplier theory to maximize the third-order harmonic element ofthe fundamental LO frequency in the proposed mixer. The designed mixer has a gate mixer structure composed of a gate terminal input for the fundamental local signal (fLO), RF signal (fRF) and a drain terminal output for the harmonic frequency (3fLO-fRF) respectively. The Ka-band harmonic mixer is designed and fabricated using a commercial GaAs MESFET device with a plastic package. The proposed mixer will provide a solution for the problems found in the high cost, complex circuitry in a conventional Ka-band mixer. The 33.5 GHz harmonic mixer has a -10 dB conversion gain by pumping 11.5 GHz LO with a +5 dBm level.