Design of a compact single-balanced mixer for UWB applications

The design and implementation aspects of a new single-balanced mixer for ultra-wideband (UWB) applications are presented in this study. The proposed mixer utilizes a miniaturized UWB ring coupler as a balun, consisting of a pair of in-phase and inverted-phase transitional structures. The well-balanced UWB performance of the ring coupler, aside from the optimized diode matching, results in improved conversion loss and inter-port isolations for a wide bandwidth. The size of the implemented single-balanced diode mixer is reduced to about 60% of the area of the conventional single-balanced ring diode mixer. The measured results of the proposed mixer exhibit an average conversion loss of 7.5 dB (minimum 6.7 dB) and a port-to-port isolation of greater than 18 dB over a UWB frequency range of 3.1-10.6 GHz. The measured results agree well with the simulated results.