A Simple Method for Millimeter-Wave Finline Balanced Mixer Design Using Three-Dimensional Field Simulation Software

摘要

In this paper, a simple method for millimeter-wave finline balanced mixerdesign using three-dimensional field simulation software has been proposed. Themethod can be widely used to design the diode-based circuits, especially for the circuitstructures with orthogonal field in some specific hybrid integrated circuits which areunavailable to be designed using the circuit simulator. In these circuits, the powerdirectly at diodes is correlated to the input reflection coefficient. The diodes mountedon the finline circuits are defined as impedance boundary in the commercial computeraideddesign (CAD) tool High Frequency Structure Simulator (HFSS) model, and hencesimulation with the use of HFSS can be implemented to optimize the input matchingnetwork of the finline circuits for transferring maximum power to the diodes. Twofinline balanced mixers at U-band using commercial GaAs Schottky diodes have beendesigned and fabricated to validate this method. Matching structures at the radiofrequency (RF) port have been employed for a better return loss and a lower conversionloss. Experiment results are presented and show good agreement with simulation data.The proposed method has proven to be useful for the design of millimeter-wave mixersin finline technique.