Abstract

This paper presents the design and performance of a GaAs pHEMT active mixer for wideband Synthetic Apertur Radar (SAR) systems. The active mixer is highly integrated and includes active baluns on the RF/LO ports, active combiner on the IF port and a Gilbert Cell mixer core. The active mixer demonstrates a 10 dB conversion gain over a 9.5 GHz RF port bandwidth. A conversion gain variation of ±0.25dB is achieved over a 800 MHz signal bandwidth for frequency conversion between C- and L-band making the active mixer suitable for SAR systems.