Design and fabrication of a single-ended gate mixer for a down-converter in wireless applications

A single-ended gate mixer with a high conversion gain, low dissipated power, wide dynamic range and good isolation factor is designed and tested. The mixer is composed of a hairpin-line band-pass filter, an input/output matching circuit, a GaAs MESFET transistor, and a lumped element low-pass filter to convert the radio frequency (RF) into an intermediate frequency (IF). In the non-linearity analysis of a GaAs MESFET, the novel method with a harmonic balance technique is used to analyze the operating characteristics of a mixer circuit. The designed mixer outperforms a general mixer for a down converter in wireless applications. (C) 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.