A High Temperature Active GaN-HEMT
Downconversion Mixer for Downhole
Communications
Jebreel M. Salem and Dong Sam Ha
Multifunctional Integrated Circuits and System (MICS) Group
Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia, 24061, USA
E-mail: {jebmms10, ha}@vt.edu
Abstract—As oil and gas industry drills deeper, temperatures
of wells can exceed 210 °C. Conventional cooling and heat
extraction techniques are impractical in the harsh environment,
which necessitates reliable electronic systems to operate at high
temperatures. This paper presents a high temperature RF
downconversion mixer targeted for downhole communications.
The proposed mixer is developed with a commercial Gallium
Nitride (GaN) high electron mobility transistor (HEMT). The RF
band for the mixer is 230-253 MHz and the IF frequency is 97.5
MHz. The mixer achieves the conversion gain of 6 dB at LO
power of -10 dBm at temperature 250 oC, and the input P1dB
compression point is -7 dBm. It dissipates 50 mW under 5 V
supply. The proposed mixer achieves a relatively high conversion
gain and good linearity at temperature of 250 oC
Keywords—High-tempreture mixer; high-temperature
electronics; GaN Mixer; downhole telemetry
I. INTRODUCTION
As the oil and gas industry continues drilling deeper to
explore unexploited wells, the downhole environments are
harsher with higher temperatures and pressures. It necessitates
more robust electronic systems to operate reliably in those
environments.
The main challenge for downhole electronic systems is the
temperature. The temperature in the deep basins can exceed
210 °C, but the current drilling operations are still below 210
°C [1]-[2]. This is due to the fact that the existing electronics
used in those systems can operate up to 150 °C before being
recovered from wells. Conventional cooling and extraction
techniques with fans are impractical for downhole systems due
to increased weight, power, and system complexity. In
addition, existing downhole systems operates at low
frequencies, which results in low data rates of about 4 Mb/s at
temperatures < 210 °C [1]. Existing systems do not meet the
growing demand for higher data rates due to higher resolution
sensors, faster logging speeds, and additional tools available
for a single wireline cable.
Since the proposed modem intends for downhole
communications systems, there is no restriction on the
frequency band to use. The VHF band is adopted for our
system considering the characteristics of the coaxial cable.
There are numerous mixer designs that operate at room
temperature [3]- [5], but very few mixer designs operating at
978-1-4799-5341-7/16/$31.00 ©2016 IEEE
85 oC or above have been reported in open literatures. To our
knowledge, this paper reports the first mixer design that can
operate at ambient temperature of 250 oC.
This paper is organized as follows. Section II describes
high temperature design considerations. Section III presents the
proposed mixer design. Section IV shows measurement results
at room and high temperatures. Section V concludes this work.
II. HIGH-TEMPERATURE DESIGN CONSIDERATIONS
The major design challenge for the proposed mixer lies in
the temperature limitation of both commercial-off-the-shelf
(COTS) passive and active devices. Silicon Carbide (SiC) can
reach high temperatures, but are for low frequency applications
[2]. GaN devices based on the HEMT technology have a wide
band gap to operate reliably at high ambient temperatures. GaN
RF power transistors offer high junction temperatures with low
thermal resistances, so RF power transistors are a good option
for high temperature RF circuits. A shortcoming of those
transistors is inherently unstable. Stability enhancing circuits
are required for GaN RF power devices at the cost of
deteriorated noise and gain performance. Thermal limitations
of packages should also be considered. The relationship of the
thermal effect is expressed as TA = TJ - Rθ×PD [6]. The
maximum ambient temperature (TA) that a GaN transistor can
operate at depends on the maximum junction temperature (TJ),
the thermal resistor of the packaged device Rθ, and the power
dissipation of the device (PD), TJ and Rθ are fixed device
parameters, and hence PD is the only parameter controllable by
the designer. It is necessary to set PD small for high
temperature applications.
Typical passive components often exhibit large variances
over a wide temperature range. In order to reduce performance
variations over temperature, it is desirable to use few passive
components. In this regard, filters and matching networks of
the mixer may be realized with transmission and microstrip
lines rather than lumped LC components. Some passive device
values such as those of RF chokes (RFCs) and DC blocking
capacitors are noncritical, and so those components can be used
rather freely. Further, note that RFCs and DC blocking
capacitors are not easily achievable with microstrip
transmission lines.
Temperature variations of active and passive devices can
shift the operating point of a transistor to cause performance
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degradations. One method to mitigate the problem is to adjust
the bias point with temperature. All the design considerations
mentioned above are adopted for the proposed mixer design.
III. PROPOSED MIXER DESIGN
The design objective of the proposed mixer is to operate
reliably at high temperatures while providing a moderate
conversion gain (CG) and reasonable linearity performance.
The design process involves device selection, circuit design,
and prototyping, which is described in this section.
A. Device Selection and Charactrization
Since the key design objective of the proposed mixer is to
be able to operate at high temperature of 230 °C, and high
frequency capabilities are the main characteristics considered
for device selections.
The active device used in this design is a commercial
Qorvo T2G6000528-Q3 packaged 0.25µm GaN on SiC
HEMT [7]. The selected transistor has high maximum junction
temperature TJ of 275 °C and reasonable thermal resistance Rθ
of 12.4 °C/W. The target application for the device is high
power RF amplifiers, and the datasheet provided by the
manufacturer has the characterization of the device at Vds=28
V and Id =200 mA at room temperature and 85oC. In our
design, the drain voltage for the bias point is reduced to 5 V to
increase the ambient temperature. So, it requires us to
characterize the device at the new bias point and temperature
of 230 °C. The s-parameter model of the device is obtained
through the characterization, and the model is imported to
Keysight’s Advanced Design System (ADS) and used in the
design of the proposed mixer.
The passive devices also are characterized at high
temperature of 230 °C and radio frequencies. S-parameter
models are created and used in our design. NPO Presidio and
IPDiA capacitors that operate up to 250 °C are selected for our
design. These capacitors are used for DC blocking as well as
matching circuits. Coilcraft iron core inductors that can operate
up to 300 °C are used as RF chocks. Vishay resistors are used
for stabilization purposes.
The board material should be able to withstand the
temperature and mechanical stress. Rogers 4003C board was
selected. Estimates show negligible expansion of the board and
<1% change in the relative dielectric constant. It suggests a
stable microstrip matching and characteristic impedance over a
wide temperature range. The glass transition temperature of the
material is >280 °C, which is sufficiently high to avoid
structural failures of our prototype. The final consideration is
the bonding material and SMA connectors used for our
prototype. Indalloy 151 soldering material was selected for the
prototype, and it provides reliable connections at high
temperature.
B. Circuit Deign
The proposed mixer performs downconversion of RF
frequencies of 230– 253 MHz to IF frequency of 97.5 MHz
with LO frequencies of 328 - 350.5 MHz. The topology of the
proposed mixer is selected considering two key requirements,
reliability at high temperatures and a moderate conversion gain.
The Gilbert cell topology offers high gain, but is eliminated
due to a large number of active devices required. A complex
circuit is more vulnerable to the temperature variation, which
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deteriorates reliability at high temperatures. A common source
topology with a single transistor is adopted for the proposed
mixer owing to low circuit complexity.
Fig. 1 shows the circuit diagram of the proposed mixer. The
selected GaN transistor is inherently unstable, and the design
should provide features to prevent oscillation over a wide
frequency range. R1 (=50Ω) is used for stabilization for low
frequencies below 60 MHz. This resistor does not increase
noise to the mixer, since the RF choke connected to the resistor
has high impedance at the in-band frequencies. A shunt resistor
R2 is connected at the gate to stabilize the device for the in-
band frequency of 200 – 300 MHz. A tradeoff has to be made
for R2 between stability and noise. Simulation results show that
100 Ω is adequate for R2 to make the mixer unconditionally
stable while adding relatively small thermal noise.
Vgs Vdd
C3 C2
R1
RFC
Crf
RFC L1 Cs
RF TL2
TL1 Cbk IF
Clo
Cp
LO R2
C1
Input MN Output MN
Fig. 1. Circuit diagram of the proposed mixer.
The RF and LO ports are connected through two series
coupling capacitors. The RF port is connected through Crf of
100 pF to the input matching network, which matches the RF
port (=50Ω) to the gate of the transistor using a transmission
line TL1. Microstrip matching is used at the RF port, since it
has smaller temperature variation compared with a lumped LC
matching network. Capacitor C1 (=165 pF) resonates with the
stub of TL1 to provide the short circuit effect to the IF
frequency of 97.5 MHz. The LO signal is injected through
capacitor Clo to transmission line TL1 followed by the transistor
gate. Capacitor Clo (=4 pF) is chosen small to isolate the LO
port from the RF port. The IF port is connected to the drain of
the transistor via transmission line TL2 and the output matching
network. TL2 reduces the output power of the IF port for the
LO frequency band (328– 350.5 MHz), and inductor L1 (=175
nH) and two capacitors, Cs (=40 pF) and Cp (=10 pF), form the
output matching network. The output matching network
matches the output impedance of the transistor to 50 Ω at the
IF frequency. Inductor L1 is an air core coil made from a high
temperature copper wire, and the inductor is characterized at
higher temperatures. Measurements show that the inductor
value drops with increasing temperature, which affects the
performance of the mixer. The variation can be compensated
by adjusting the bias point at high temperatures, which is
described in Section IV B.
RF chokes and DC blocking capacitor Cbk serve as a bias-T
for the gate bias voltage Vgs. Capacitor Cs, which is part of the
output matching network, also serves to block DC voltage at
the output. Capacitors C2 and C3 are bypass capacitors.
Fig. 2 shows the prototype of the mixer. The transistor is
shown at the center of the board, and two matching filters are
located low left and right sides.
 Vgs Vdd

RF Port

LO Port IF Port

Fig. 2. A photograph of the mixer prototype.

IV. MEASUREMENT RESULTS

This section presents measurement results of the proposed Fig. 4. Measured noise figure versus RF frequency at differet
mixer at room temperature and up to 250 oC. Also it compares tempaerature levels. fLO varies from 328.0 MHz to 350.9 MHz, and LO
the performance at different temperatures and discusses power is -15dBm. RF power =-30 dBm and fIF= 97.5 MHz.
adjustment of the bias point to mitigate the performance
variations with temperature.
A. Measurement Setup
Measurements with high temperature cables and connecters
were carried out at room and high temperatures inside a
Yamato natural convection drying furnace. Rohde & Schwarz
ZVL network analyzer was used to measure s-parameters and
stability, and noise figure analyzer N8975A for CG and noise
figure (NF).
B. Measurement Results
The optimum bias point of Vgs = -2.57 V, and Id = 22 mA Fig. 5. Measured CG versus RF frequency for differet gate bias voltages
under Vdd = 5 V results in best performance in the CG and NF (Vgs) at 250oC. fLO varies from 328.0 MHz to 350.5 MHz, while LO
power = -15 dBm, RF power = -30 dBm, and fIF= 97.5 MHz.
at room temperature and is obtained through measurements.
Then, the furnace temperature is elevated gradually up to 230
o
C under the fixed Vgs of -2.57 V. The performance is observed
at four different temperatures of 25 oC, 150 oC, 200 oC and 230
o
C. The measured CG versus RF frequency is shown in Fig. 3.
It can be observed that the CG drops with increased
temperature. For example, the CG drops by 9 dB from 6 dB at
25 oC to -3 dB at 230 oC for the frequency of 243 MHz. It was
also observed that the drain current increases to 47 mA at
230oC.

Fig. 6. Measured NF versus RF frequency for differet gate bias voltages

(Vgs) at 250oC. fLO varies from 328.0 MHz to 350.9 MHz, while LO
power = -10dBm, RF power =-30 dBm, and fIF= 97.5 MHz.

indicate that adjustment of the bias voltage according to the

Fig. 3. Measured conversion gain versus RF frequency at different
temperatures. fLO varies from 328.0 MHz to 350.5 MHz, while LO power
= -15 dBm. RF power = -30 dBm, and fIF= 97.5 MHz.
ambient temperature improve the performance of the mixer.
Now, the LO power is swept from -20 dBm to +12 dBm
while RF = -30.0 dBm, fLo=340.5 MHz, fRF=243 MHz, and
fIF=97.5 MHz. Fig. 7 shows the measured CG for different
temperatures as the LO power varies. The CG is saturated at
15.0 dB for LO power of 5 dBm at room temperature and 12.5

Fig. 4 shows the measured NF at different temperatures.

The NF performance deteriorates as the temperature increases.
For example, the NF under the frequency of 243 MHz
increases by 6 dB from 13.0 dB at 25 oC to 19.0 dB at 230 oC.
Although our initial target temperature is 230 oC, we
noticed that the mixer can operate at a higher temperature of
250 oC. So we measured the performance at 250 oC for the
following ones. The temperature is fixed at 250 oC. The bias
voltage is swept to find the optimum value. It was observed
that when Vgs is biased at -2.75 V instead of -2.57 (which is Fig. 7. Measured CG versus LO power at differet tempaeratures. fLO
varies from 340.5 MHz to 350.9 MHz, while fRF =243 MHz, RF power =
optimum at room temperature), the CG improves by 3.7 dB and -30 dBm, and fIF= 97.5 MHz.
NF improves by 1.65 dB. Fig. 5 & Fig. 6 show the CG and NF
versus Vgs at 250 oC, respectively. The measurement results

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dB for LO power of 8 dBm at 250 oC. voltage according to the ambient temperature. For example,
when the optimal gate voltage (= -2.57 V) at room temperature
The linearity of the mixer is also evaluated at room is changed to -2.75 V at 250 oC, the average conversion gain
temperature and 250 oC. A single-tone test is carried out by and noise figure improve by 3.7 dB and 1.65 dB, respectively.
sweeping the RF power at fRF = 243 MHz and LO power = -10 The mixer has the input 1-dB compression point of -7 dBm,
dBm, and the 1dB compression point is measured at room which would be suitable for downhole communication systems
temperature and 250 oC. As the temperature increases, the and applicable for systems operating in harsh environment.
linearity improves at the cost of the CG. The input 1-dB
compression point is obtained as -12 dBm at room temperature The proposed mixer could be implemented in an IC at
and -7 dBm at 250 oC. Fig. 8 shows the output IF power versus higher frequencies, in which the transmission lines can be
the input RF power at room temperature and 250 oC. made much smaller. The task is open for future research.
TABLE I. PERFORMANCE OF HIGH TEMPERATURE MIXER
Parameter [3] [4] [5] This work
Temperature (oC) 25 25 85 250
0.18µm 0.13µm 0.18µm GaN
Technology
CMOS CMOS CMOS HEMT
3.1 0.23 ~
Frequency (GHz) 0.2 ~13 2.5 -3.5
~10.6 0.25
LO Power (dBm) 5 -3 - -10
CG (dB) 9.9 9.8 ~14 9.2 6
NF (dB) 11 14.5~19 14 17
Input P1dB (dBm) -20 -24 ~ -20 -1.5 -7
o o
Fig. 8. Measured IF power versus RF power at 25 C and 250 C. fLO Power Consumption
0.88 1.85 5.58 50
varies from 340.5 MHz to 350.9 MHz, while fRF =243 MHz, LO power (mW)
= -10 dBm, and fIF= 97.5 MHz.

Table 1 compares the performance of the proposed mixer
with a few relevant mixers, two at room temperature and one at
85 oC. The CG of the proposed mixer is lower than the other
three mixers and the NF higher. The comparison intends to
show only the standing of the proposed mixer performance, but
should not be used as a direct comparison of the performance
due to different ambient temperature, technology used, and
design objectives. Nonetheless, we believe that the proposed
mixer achieves good performance with relaxed VCO
requirements (LO Power = -10 dBm) at 250 oC. To our
knowledge the proposed mixer is the first one operating at 250
o
C reported in the open literature.
V. CONCLUSION
A high temperature downconversion mixer is presented in
this paper. The mixer employs a single ended topology and is
composed of a single GaN HEMT transistor. It achieves the
conversion gain of 6 dB at reasonably low LO power (=-10
dBm) at high temperature of 250 oC. Also, the conversion gain
and noise figure can be improved by adjusting the gate bias
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