84 IEEE MICROWAVE AND WIRELESS COMPONENTS LETTERS, VOL. 16, NO.

2, FEBRUARY 2006

Development of a Low Cost Microwave Mixer

Using a Broad-band Substrate Integrated
Waveguide (SIW) Coupler
Ji-Xin Chen, Wei Hong, Member, IEEE, Zhang-Cheng Hao, Hao Li, and Ke Wu, Fellow, IEEE

Abstract—A Low cost single-balanced mixer is designed using

a newly designed 90 substrate integrated waveguide (SIW) 3-dB
coupler, which takes the advantages of low cost, low profile, and
high performance. An X-band single-balanced SIW mixer is
designed and fabricated with a standard printed circuit board
process. Measured conversion loss of 6.8 dB and the wide-band
response from 8.5 to 12 GHz are presented.
Index Terms—Conversion loss, coupler, single-balanced mixer,
substrate integrated waveguide (SIW).

I. INTRODUCTION

T HE design of modern microwave and millimeter wave

communication systems requires low-cost and high per-
formance mixers. New technologies of passive components
Fig. 1. Configuration of the proposed SIW mixer.

always stimulate the design of microwave devices including In this letter, we will first discuss the SIW coupler, then de-
mixers. Recently, a convenient and interesting planar integra- scribe the design of the mixer, and finally present the experi-
tion scheme called substrate integrated waveguide (SIW) has mental results as well as its electrical performances.
already attracted much interest. Many passive components,
such as filters, multiplexers, antennas, and power dividers, etc. II. DESIGN OF THE BROADBAND SIW COUPLER
based on SIW and some similar technologies have been studied It is known that the propagation properties of the -like
by researchers in [1]–[22], and they have been incorporated in mode in a SIW are very similar to that of the mode of a
the design of active devices in microwave and millimeter-wave conventional rectangular guide. An equivalent relationship be-
systems [23]. The advance of a SIW coupler led to the devel- tween the conventional rectangular waveguide and the SIW can
opment of the mixer in this work. be used to initially determine the geometric parameters [5]
The topology of the proposed mixer is illustrated in Fig. 1.
It is a single-balanced mixer employing two diodes connected
(1)
back-to-back and a SIW coupler formed on the same dielectric
substrate. The SIW coupler acts as the input and power delivery
component instead of the conventional 90 , or hybrid coupler. where is a normalized coefficient, is the width of the cor-
Because of the field shielding nature of SIW structure, the radi- responding rectangular waveguide, is the width in the
ation loss exists only at the transitions between the SIW coupler SIW, is the radius of vias, is the space between
and microstrip, and thus minimizes the insertion loss and the vias, and , , and are defined as
interference on other circuits. By careful design of the coupler
and transitions, the 90 SIW coupler shows a considerably wide (2)
band performance at desired frequency, thus enhancing the per-
formance of the mixer.
(3)
Manuscript received July 29, 2005; revised October 24, 2005. This work was
supported in part by the National High Tech Research Plan of China (863 Plan) (4)
under Grant 2005AA123830 and in part by the National Science Foundation of
China under Grant 90307016. The review of this letter was arranged by Asso-
ciate Editor A. Weisshaar.
J.-X. Chen, W. Hong, Z.-C. Hao, and H. Li are with the State Key Laboratory Fig. 2 shows the structure of the SIW coupler, the spacing “a”
of Millimeter Waves, Department of Radio Engineering, Southeast University, between the two rows of metallic vias determines the frequency
Nanjing 210096, China (e-mail: jxchen@emfield.org). band of the waveguide. The via diameter “D” is chosen to be
K. Wu is with the Poly-Grames Research Center, Department of Electrical equal or smaller than a tenth of the wavelength of the maximum
Engineering, Ecole Polytechnique, University of Montreal, Montreal, QC H3C
3J7, Canada. operation frequency, and spacing “s” is equal or smaller than
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LMWC.2005.863199 twice the diameter of the metallic via. A concave area is formed
1531-1309/$20.00 © 2006 IEEE
CHEN et al.: DEVELOPMENT OF A LOW COST MICROWAVE MIXER
Fig. 2. Geometry of the SIW coupler.
TABLE I
DIMENSIONS OF THE STRUCTURE
Fig. 3. Measured S -parameters of SIW coupler.
in the middle with length “l2” and depth “h.” “l3” is the length
of SIW in each port. “l1” is the length between the port and the
concave area. We can tune “l1,” “l2,” “w2,” and “h” to control
the coupling.
A microstrip taper with width “tw” and “w1” and length “tl”
is adopted to match the microstrip and SIW in wideband.
The parameters are finely tuned using three-dimensional
(3-D) electromagnetic (EM) simulation software high-fre-
quency structure simulator (HFSS) to achieve wide-band
performance. The final dimensions of the SIW coupler are
presented in Table I. Fig. 3 shows the measured -parameters
of the coupler. Fig. 4 shows the measured phase difference be-
tween two output ports. It can be seen the outputs at ports 2 and
3 are 3.8 dB to 4.5 dB, respectively, the phase difference is
distributed in the range of 88.3 95.5 within the frequency
band of 8.5 to 12 GHz, which is slightly more than simulation
results.
III. DESIGN OF THE SINGLE-BALANCED MIXER
The single-balanced mixer [24] using the 90 SIW coupler
is shown in Fig. 1. The two quarter-wavelength lines at the far
side of diode pair provides a ground return and isolation for
the intermediate frequency (IF), while allowing radio frequency
(RF) and local oscillator (LO) frequencies to pass. Between the
85
Fig. 4. Measured phase difference of SIW coupler.
Fig. 5. Photograph of the fabricated SIW mixer.
Fig. 6. Measured output spectrum of the SIW mixer.
two diodes, another quarter-wavelength open-circuited stub at
the LO frequency is adopted to prevent LO leakage. At the IF
port, a stepped impedance low-pass filter was designed for IF
output and isolation of RF and LO.
The mixer was simulated with Agilent ADS. Broad-band field
analysis results of SIW coupler from HFSS are included in the
harmonic balance simulation using “S4P” data item of ADS.
Simulation results show a 5.86-dB conversion loss at 8-dBm LO
drives.
IV. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
The photograph of a proposed mixer is shown in Fig. 5, which
is fabricated on a 0.5-mm thickness F4BK printed circuit board
(PCB) with the dielectric constant of 2.4. The board size is
9.5 cm 4.5 cm. Fig. 6 shows the output spectrum of single tone
test at IF port with a 10-dBm RF input signal. Fig. 7 compares
the simulated and measured conversion loss at 10-GHz RF and
86 IEEE MICROWAVE AND WIRELESS COMPONENTS LETTERS, VOL. 16, NO. 2, FEBRUARY 2006
Fig. 7. Conversion loss versus LO power.
Fig. 8. Conversion loss versus RF frequency.
11.92-GHz LO. It is 6.8 dB at 8-dBm LO drive in measurement.
In Fig. 8, LO frequency was set at 12 GHz, RF frequency was
swept, testing result shows the conversion loss is less than 10 dB
in a wide RF frequency band (from 9 GHz to nearly 12 GHz,
high LO).
V. CONCLUSION
In this letter, we proposed a low cost single-balanced mi-
crowave mixer using a 90 SIW Coupler. Experimental results
validate the performances and the highly integration of the pro-
posed mixer. We believe this kind of mixer will be a good choice
for designing high performance microwave and millimeter wave
integrated circuits.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors wish to thank H.-J. Tang and P.-P. Yan, et al. for
their many helpful comments and discussions.
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