Size-reduction of frequency mixers using artificial dielectric substrate

A size-reduced high frequency mixer designed by adopting artificial dielectric substrate is described in this work. The artificial dielectric substrate is composed by stacking the lower substrate in which a lot of metalized via-holes exist, and upper substrate on which microstrip lines are realized. The effective dielectric constant increases due to the inserted lots of via-holes, and this may be applied to size-reduction of high frequency circuits. In this work, in order to present an application example of size-reduction for active high frequency circuits using the artificial dielectric substrate, a 8GHz single gate mixer is miniaturized and measured. It is described that the basic circuit elements for mixers such as hybrid, low pass filter, and matching networks can be replaced by the artificial dielectric substrate for size-reduction. The final mixer has 55% of size compared to the normal one. The measured average conversion gain is around 3dB which is almost similar result as the normal circuit.