Review Of Mixer And Balun Designs For Uwb Applications

This paper presents an important review on mixer and balun designs for several UWB (ultra-wideband) applications that generally operate in frequencies ranging from 3.1 to 10.6 GHz. This paper begins with an introduction of mixer and balun terminologies, followed by discussion and comparison of several types of mixer designs and their performance on conversion gain, noise figure, third-order intercept points input, and port-to-port isolation. Balun plays an important role in RF mixer designs as it converts the single-ended signal coming from LNA into a differential signal that suitable for mixer input terminal. Hence, baluns provide impedance transformation and matching network for structures transition in mixer designs. The previous studies are reviewed and compared in order to gain a better understanding in RF mixers. An alternative design of balun can be suggested to be utilized in mixer designs to produce overall good performance for multi- function operation in UWB applications