V-band and W-band broadband, monolithic distributed frequency multipliers

Abstract

Broadband V-Band and W-Band frequency multiplication is reported using soliton propagation on GaAs monolithic nonlinear transmission lines. With 24 dBm input a doubler attained 17.4 dBm peak output power with at least 52-63.1 GHz 3-dB bandwidth, and a mpler attained 12.8 dBm peak output power with at least 81-108.8 GHz 3-dB bandwidth. These multipliers, fabricated with 3-pm design rules on Gas and driven with lower frequency amplifiers, have applications as cost-effective signal sources in mm-wave communication and measurement systems.

A New Passive CMOS Mixer With LO Shaping Technique for mmWave Applications

“…2 depicts the schematic of the mixer where the circuitry within the dotted line represents the NLTL, which consists of inductors L 1 /L 2 (140 pH) and varactors C v1 /C v2 (40 fF). From [5], the Bragg frequency f b = 1/(π √ L 1 C V 1 ) is chosen to be f b /3 < fin < f b /2 to obtain high 2nd harmonic generation, which benefits the waveform shaping. The NLTL's characteristic impedance Z o = (L 1 /C V 1 ) is chosen to be around 60 Ω to optimize the tradeoff between waveform shaping and loss.…”

“…We introduce a new topology of passive mixers using NonLinear Transmission Line (NLTL) [4], and present the analysis, implementation, and validation of the new topology in this letter, which reshapes the LO waveform to improve the conversion gain, linearity, and noise figure (NF) of the mixers simultaneously. The NLTL concept was similar to that introduced in [5] for a frequency multiplier and in [6] for pulse shaping. In addition, the proposed mixer topology employs a capacitive loaded non-return-to-zero (NRZ) sampling architecture [7] …”

Millimeter-wave nonlinear transmission line tripler

“…NLTL frequency multipliers have been investigated in [7][8][9], which have the potential advantages of higher conversion efficiencies and/or broader bandwidth. As discussed before, impulses having durations "PWHM > l.2l2JLC0V0 / correspond to a nonlinear superposition of a set of solitons having different per-section propagation amplitudes (i.e.…”

“…Soliton propagation is considered as an important means for both impulse compression and distortionless impulse propagation [I]. Soliton propagation along NLTLs has been investigated for the last decade based on applications in impulse compression [2-6J and harmonic generation [7][8][9].…”

Travelling wave generation of millimeter waves in bimodal NLTLs

“…The generation of millimeter waves by harmonic frequency generation along nonlinear transmission lines (NLTLs) has recently become a subject of major research activities [1,2]. However, the power efficiencies achieved so far are small because millimeterwave power is converted into undesired frequency components when the dispersion and filter characteristics of the NLTL are not designed in a suitable way.…”