A second harmonic self-oscillating mixer incorporating resonant cell structure

A downconverting second harmonic self-oscillating mixer (SOM) is developed for low-cost wireless communications applications. Incorporating resonant cell in the SOM, we can provide suitable oscillation for generating LO and terminations to all major unwanted mixing products, leading to high conversion gain design. The proposed SOM was measured with 8.5 dB downconversion gain at the RF frequency of 8.2 GHz RF, LO frequency of 4.0 GHz, and IF frequency of 0.2 GHz. The proposed design achieves higher conversion gain than that of the SOM without resonant cell. © 2012 Leung Chiu and Quan Xue.