Diode Mixers

Today we’re going to talk about the basics of mixing and some other critical metrics that
we use to measure mixers. We’ll talk about one of the fundamental ways at which we
create a mixer and that’s by using nonlinearity of a circuit element; we’ll talk specifically
about several diode mixer types, cleaning a single diode mixer, a balanced diode mixer,
and a double balanced diode mixer and we’ll touch briefly on a BJT mixer and then also
the FET or Switch mixer.
Alright, so this is a slide we had earlier in our series, which basically talked about the
function of multiplication in RF systems. We have some baseband signal that we want to
convert to a modulated carrier at RF and we use a mixer to mix or multiply our oscillator
by our baseband signal and we typically called this our LO or local oscillator.
From a frequency-domain standpoint, you remember if we had a baseband signal, this
multiplication took this and just routed right on top of the carrier so that we had here. So
this is the function mixing in RF in this is just a review, but what we’re going to do was
talk about how do we actually do this mixing or multiplication.
So let’s talk a little bit about some if the metrics we’re going to use to describe mixers.
The first one is a conversion gain or loss; now I just tell you that most mixers have a loss,
but we have a tendency to call everything to gain and then just make negative if its loss
in dB. And linear loss would be to something less than 1 and typically, this is the IF
output versus the input RF power. So we basically take a signal from our antenna, we
down-convert it, we look at the power that comes out at IF and we compare that to the
input power of the RF. So it’s Pout/Pin or PIF/PRF. You could look at it the other way where
you’re taking your baseband and up-converting it and then it will be the same, you just
say what’s the ratio basically my output over my input; in that case it would be RF over
IF. So just this is the general conversion gain formula and you just need to figure out how
you’re define it, what’s the input, and what’s the output. Typically, for passive devices, it’s
-6 dB or even higher; for active circuits even without an amplifier, we can get conversion
gains around 0dB and this typically is by using a switch mixer for which will talk about a
little bit later. The next metric is isolation dB and the key thing here is that we’ve talked
many times about not wanting LO leakage and so isolation basically is in numeric metric
that tells us what is the ratio of the LO coming into the mixer and the LO component
leaving the mixer and that tells us what the total isolationist is. So, it’s: and finally the one
dB compression point. You remember this graph and the idea here is as my RF is
increased, my “I” effort output will eventually compress and typically, this point depends
upon the LO power and typically it’s about 10 dB below where your PLO would be.
Typically, you have a much higher LO power than RF and as the RF power increases,
you’re doing pretty well until you get to about within 10 dB of your LO and the way to
think about that is your RF signal now is starting to become on the same order of your
LO signal and the mixing is slightly different.

Alright, so let’s talk about mixer and nonlinearity. So, multiplication is not done
mathematically, but rather using a nonlinear transfer function and this is true for any type
that mixer that we’re going to use in a real circuit. We don’t have a mathematical up
equivalent of mix of a multiplication and so what we do is we use a nonlinear element
and if you member the Taylor series, you can see that right there in the middle of it is a
nice multiplication. And all you have to do is just set your Vin equal to your baseband
signal plus your RFin or in this case this would be your RFin this would be the LO and this
would give you a down-converted signal. So we’re basically just using the fact that I
could multiply Vin if I take squared to be a cross-term here and that’s the cross-term that
will do. And what we just do that real quickly so you could see it: we have
Alright, we can see right here this is our multiplicative term that we’re looking for; so this
is how we can do multiplier, but some things that we’ll notice is that if you remember from
the Taylor series that a2 or our alpha 2 is usually smaller than alpha-1 and then we also
have all this other junk here. So one of the challenges with mixers is to try to minimize all
of these other elements and maximize the one element you want. I’ll just make a little
note here there is a component of V3 that we use. So there are some harmonics of these
later ones that do go to the exact frequency we want, but they’re smaller in amplitude
and we ignore them, but I just want to point out it’s not strictly this and you’ll see that
explicitly in a later example.
This is a plot from one of our earlier lectures where basically, I’m just showing you our
mixer is a nonlinear transfer function and remember when we were doing on IP3
calculations of two input signals, this is the Taylor series and I just highlighted here for
you really clear; you can see that there is a clear multiplicative component that’s exactly
what we want to make a So, it’s all ties back and together we had mentioned that
nonlinearity is not always bad and for mixing it’s what we actually use.
So the typical nonlinear transfer function that we use is an exponential and that’s
because there’s many components that have exponential transfer functions and it’s
highly nonlinear, which gives us a larger coefficients for alpha two, three, four, and five
and on this is a nice animation of each end is adding another term for the Taylor series
and you can see that much once we get to 8, it’s pretty well done 0, 1; so 2 is pretty
significant, so is three, and then four and beyond get less than correct effect; so, that’s a
nice little GIF animation from Wikipedia and what device has an expensive transfer
function? I think I already had enough to this; it’s simply a diode. So we’re going to use
diode’s exponential transfer function between voltage and current to create a mixing
product. We’re using the input as a one because when we get squared. Don’t forget we
get that component it’s as we drive to the previous slide.
Alright so take a look at a single diode mixer. So we’ve got it here and we’ve got our
single diode and I’ve labelled VA and VB and the reason I’ve done this is that the diode is
the current and the diode is equal to some nominal current E to the V, EE the over VT and
VBE is just going to be the difference of VA minus VB. And in lab, you can learn about these
branches, but basically we’re going to have – if you look at the spectrum of ID versus
frequency, you’re going to see a whole bunch of different components. So we’re going to
have high-frequency components and low-frequency components and in one example
that we’re going to use, we’re actually going to use a LO of 105 megahertz and an IF of 5
megahertz and RF can be the 100 or 110 megahertz, depending on which one we select.
So what we’re doing here as I’m going to select this filter to allow signals from five
megahertz through and I’m going to set this filter to allow signals a hundred megahertz
through, but no five megahertz. And what this does is it basically separates all of the
higher frequency currents are going to go through this path, and all the lower frequency
currents are going to go to that path. So this is a common circuit technique to separate
the high and low currents from the diode, even though in the diode, the total current
flowing has many different components and we’ll see explicitly how this works in a
minute. So here’s the diode current just doing a Taylor series expansion of this and I just
multiplied this out and you could see that we have the exact term we’ve been looking for,
which is right here as VA times VB and you can see we’ve got a lot of squares and then
we’ve got feed through from both of our signals coming in and that we’ve got a cube
down here at the bottom. And all I’m mentioning is these such as you can see that we
have all our other components here in the diode. And this is a trig identity that becomes
useful and the reason is this block will end up containing and if we multiplied it out and
that actually has a DC component 1/2 that gets multiplied by this and so we get a and
that’s exactly it the same frequencies as this component. So just reiterating once again,
high-order harmonics do create a component at our desired frequencies, however these
coefficients like alpha 3 are pretty so they tend to pass the cube and tend not to be
important.
Alright, so here is the RF power out of that circuit. And once again, here’s the breakup
and let’s just take a look. We can see just remember the LO is a 105 megahertz and the
IF was 5 megahertz. So we can see right away the LO; we’ve got the LO here that is
coming through. We’ve also got the IF coming through; we’ve got our multiplication,
which should give us a 105 plus or minus five megahertz right here and that’s right here.
And then we have our LO squared, which if we do , that gives us and so we have at 210
gigahertz another significant component. And then we’ve got all these little sidebands
that are coming through here. So, we can see that from our equation, we can actually
see pretty well the signals that are coming through and we do indeed have exactly the
signals that we wanted for our mixing product; you can choose either the upper or lower
sideband here. Now, the LO is at seven dBm and the IF is at -5. So let’s take a look at
conversion loss in isolation; so let’s look at isolation. So the LO is 7 dBm, but we can see
here that when it comes to the outputs, it’s -1.6. So, I’m looking for the difference and I
see that there’s an 8.67dB isolation between the LO and the RF. Now, I’m just taking the
difference because the isolation is a ratio and so I can just add or subtract the numbers
in dB and conversion gain should be what our RF output is and our RF outputs, just
checking upper sideband, is -16, but remember the input is -5. And so I take the
difference and that means the conversion gain is -11.6dB or we lose an order of
magnitude of the input signal when we up-convert it. So that sounds like a lot, but with an
amplifier, we could gain that back, but in you know the RF world, 10dB is not at great
thing to lose, but we deal in 10, 20, 30, 40, or 50dB. So it’s not ridiculous that we couldn’t
actually use this for successful mixer. We would have to filter out a lot of other
components, higher frequencies, and also if we wanted to get rid of any of these when
we transmitted it, we have two find some filters to try to get rid of those.
This is why people use a balance diode mixer and these two pass do the same thing; this
is going to take the high frequency and it’s going to move out here below frequency. So
this is low, this is the high and it’s doing exactly what we did before. It’s called a diplexer
and it’s just splitting out the frequencies from the diode currents. Now, we’ve got two
diodes here and you’ll notice that they have same junction here and what that means is
that we end up with summing node here. So this diode is pumping current in and this
diode is pumping current out, it’s just going to flow through this node and nothing is going
to go into either branch. So you can already see that maybe, we’re starting to cancel
some products and what we do is we take our LO and we create a plus and minus VB so
that we’re going to have a VA minus VB and a VB minus VA as two of our products and we’ll
do that explicitly.

Alright, we’re going to do the math, but in the end you’ll see exactly how this works. This
is just the diode equation for one diode and here expanded it. You’ve already seen this
expansion before; here’s the one for the other and you notice that we have a polarity
changed and that’s because we created that differential voltage and we can expand that
out and you are ready can start to see that I’ve got some minus signs here where I didn’t
before and what we do now as we take the difference of the two currents. Remember, it’s
that summing junction that’s just going to in an easy single node; take the summation for
us and so we take ID1, subtracted ID2 and if you notice, you can already see that it cancels,
cancels, cancels, cancels, cancels, and we’re left with this term and this term. And if you
went through and expanded things, you’d and up with – this is your final aspect and so
you can see here’s the VB here’s the 4VAVB and if you’re that identity issue before noticing
this DC component, it turns up this contains and this also will contain and remember this
as a DC component so it will keep this frequency band. So you can see that by using two
diodes, we’re able to cancel a lot of things namely we’re able to cancel the LO.
So, let’s take a look at what we’ve got here and we can see – you know we’ve got a
multiplication, which is our 2 signals we want. We have a little bit of our IF coming
through, but you notice that LO is really small and so this cancellation is actually been
super good for us. So once again, the LO is a 105 and the IF is five megahertz 7 dBm
-5dBm. Let’s calculate the isolation; so the LO is 7 and here it is -58. So we have a
whopping 65dB of isolation. So right away, you can see where people use a balanced
mixer when they can. The conversion gain and loss and remember the IF signal is -5, the
output here look at this; it’s 6 dB higher and its -10.6 and we end up with a conversion
loss -6.6dB. So, this is roughly a factor of four and so this is great; we’ve significantly
increased our isolation and we’ve gotten about three-and-a-half dB higher, roughly twice
or three times the output of power. So, this is a great design; this is actually used very
often; it’s simple and it’s cheap and as you can see, it works great.
But, there’s one more topology that works even better and this is a double balanced
mixer. And it looks a little bit complicated; we’ve got our LO coming in here, we’ve got
our RF coming in here, and here’s our IF output. And just to help you remember I put a
plus and minus here, I get a plus and minus here and a plus minus here and that’ll be
important in a second. Alright, so the operation of this is to think about the LO is being
very large and so when this is positive and this is negative, these two are reverse bias.
So we can consider them off; these two are forward biases, but they’re the same diodes.
So this point is basically a virtual ground; if it needs to source any current, it’ll come out
of this node. If it needs to sink any current, it’ll go out of that node and this really is for RF
is just a ground. This here’s an open and so what that means is when I have a positive
RF signal coming in and I’m going to get a positive signal here and I get a positive signal
here. So now let’s look at the off-set phase the LO, where we just reverse the polarities
over here. Now, these two diodes are on and this is ground; now, let’s look at what
happens when I have a positive RF voltage, I’m going to get a negative IF footage. So,
what the LO is going to do it is going to take the RF signal and it’s going to multiply it by
a string of 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, and we know this is just a trustee square wave. So we’re
going to take the RF and let’s multiply the LO and what we’re using these diodes are as
our switches and it seems a little odd but if you think about it in this configuration, you’ll
be no difference if I connected the node to the ground. And by using a high and low LO,
we’re able to turn the two different diodes on and reverse polarity using this transformer.
Our BALUN in a transmission line circuits; we talked about the rat-race coupler as a way
to create a 180 degrees phase shift and this would give you these two sides; you need to
have a center tap if you wanted to get a center out. So this is like a BALUN with the
center tap as a transformer function. So we can think about the double balanced mixer
as simply multiplying a square wave with the LO times the sine wave at the RF and so
it’s a sine wave times square wave and what we can do is simply do the Fourier series of
this. And if you multiply it out, you end up with and then we’re going to have odd
harmonics that match up with the square wave for your series.
And if you look at the spectrum, you see right away that things are looking really nice. So
first off, the five megahertz signal is gone and LO is gone. When I say gone, it’s really
gone. So we’re just left with the two side bands and there are already higher in power.
The only thing you do have to watch out is these third order harmonics are not as small;
they’re only -20dB so you just have to make sure you filter these out and you aren’t
transmitting these, but the second orders are small and this 10 megahertz – I actually
believe comes from anyone in the upper sidebands.

And so, same as before; 7dB minus 5dB; Let’s calculate our isolation; there’s LO, so it’s
roughly 0 conversion gain and loss is minus 9.9 minus 5; we end up at minus 4.9 and
this is about the best you’re going to get for a mixer. There are higher order, if you will,
diode configurations where you can use two double balanced mixer and try to cancel
more harmonics, but generally for diode passive mixer, you’re certainly not going to get
better than 3 dB loss and typically just a rule of thumb, as to say if I use a decent
balanced or double balanced, I’m going to end up with 60dB of loss in particularly real
circuit. This is somewhat ideal that we have here.

Just to do a quick comparison of the diodes; so for single diode, it’s simple it’s cheap, but
it has poor performance, especially in conversion gain. The balanced diode is simple, but
requires a BALUN, requires a single to differential conversion which is not trivial unless
you have some transmission lines to do it or at lower frequencies; you can do it with a
transformer, as good conversion gain and isolation. The double balanced mixer has
great conversion gain, good linearity, and isolation. It’s more complex and you need two
BALUNs. So typically if you’re going to build a radio and the mixers that we’re going to
use in our final projects, we’re all going to be double balanced mixers sold by many
circuits and they’re about 50 bucks a piece. If you’re actually build your own for radio
circuit that will probably cost you somewhere around 10-40 cents depending on height
the balance whereas a single diode mixer is cheap as it’s just cost a few pennies. And
the other thing is a double balanced mixer does require high LO power because we want
to try to turn those diodes on and off…