A Millimeter-Wave 4th-Harmonic Schottky Diode Mixer with Integrated Local Oscillator

In this paper the design and experimental validation of a fourth-harmonic mixer based on Schottky diodes working around 300 GHz is presented. The main novelty of this work consists in the integration of an MMIC-based local oscillator, working around 75 GHz, and a mixer in the same metallic block housing. A prototype has been characterized using the Y-Factor method and yields a best measured conversion loss and an equivalent noise temperature of 14 dB and 9600 K, respectively. This performance is comparable to the state-of-the-art for this type of mixer.