Motorola Corporation

Michael J Friesen

Warren L Seely

Benny W Lowe

Shawn F Nixon

A broad bandwidth double balanced mixer with all circuitry contained on a single MMIC die is disclosed using planar magic tee hybrids to greatly reduce component quantity and die area. The hybrids comprise a Lange coupler followed by a capacitor and a quarter-wavelength transmission line on the direct path, in conjunction with a half-wavelength transmission line on the coupled path. The hybrid is essentially a planar realization of a magic tee, producing two equal magnitude outputs that are substantially 180 degrees separated in phase, with the coupled input terminated in 50 ohms. The mixer topology is a ring configured diode quad with two magic tee's at the RF and LO ports and a Wilkinson power divider at the IF port.

Planar magic-tee double balanced mixer

A detector/video amplifier (DVA)includes a microwave monolithic integrated circuit (MMIC) detector processor for converting a modulated RF input signal to a baseband signal in video and a MMIC amplifier coupled to and located on a single MMIC chip with the MMIC detector processor. The MMIC amplifier amplifies the baseband signal to the video output signal. The DVA is temperature compensated and achieves detection across the full Ku band (12-18 GHz).

Detector and video amplifier

A logarithmic amplifier includes amplifier stages having an input transmission line and first and second output transmission lines. The input and output transmission line are coupled by multiple amplifier elements distributed along the transmission lines. One output transmission line forms a high gain low compression path and the other a low gain high compression path. The output transmission lines of each stage are coupled to a combiner from whence the logarithmically amplified output signal is obtained. The logarithmic amplifier stages are readily constructed in MMIC form and multiple stages may be easily cascaded to provide a very large dynamic range.

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Phoenix, AZ, United States of America

Michael J Friesen