Conversor de frecuencia con control vectorial para aplicaciones de conformado de haz en agrupaciones de antenas en recepción

Abstract

In this paper, a simple and non expensive solution to be employed as constitutive element in receiving phased arrays is proposed. Properly adjusting a PHEMT gate biasing voltage, when used in an active mixing topology, the fundamental component of the time-varying transconductance may be controlled both in magnitude and sign. In this way, a downconverting I/Q architecture implemented over such mixers could allow introducing the desired level and phase shifting over the resulting intermediate frequency (IF) signal for beamsteering or beamforming purposes. A proof of concept lab model at the 900 MHz band has been designed and tested over the NE3210s01 device. A four quadrant phase control is demonstrated along a 10 dB level range, validating the suggested approach. The array unit performance in terms of the desired and intermodulation distortion components is also accurately predicted from the derivatives’ profile of device main nonlinearity.