Designing of 8-Gate Fingered GaN HEMT based Frequency Mixer with Enhanced Gain for Wide Band Communication Systems

Abstract

The reconfigurable mixer plays an important role in both transmitter as well as receiver section in the present wireless and digital communication systems. Also such mixer requires lot of power for up-converting and down-converting the signal without any noise. This paper deals about such type of designing of reconfigurable mixer for wide band communication applications with Gallium Nitride High Electron Mobility Transistor (GaN HEMT). This GaN HEMT transistor solves the requirement of huge power over wide range without any noise. The mixer is designed in the present paper for variable gain conversion along with power consumption trade-off for a wide range of frequency (2–8 GHz) with reconfigurable concept. Applied Wave Research (AWR) simulator was used to design the reconfigurable mixer. The gain is controlled by changing the trans-conductance of the input RF stage, and the current steering in trans-impedance stage. A broadband down-converter mixer is designed that provide different conversion gain, ranging from 25–33.5 dB with two different modes. The large bandwidth of the mixer is achieved by shunting the trans-conductance stage and with various switching stages. The results also show that there is good isolation along with conversion gain of designed reconfigurable mixer, for wide range in various communication applications.