Ku-Band Mixers Based on Random-Oriented Carbon Nanotube Films
Mengnan Chang,
Jiale Qian,
Zhaohui Li,
Xiaohan Cheng,
Ying Wang,
Ling Fan,
Juexian Cao,
Li Ding
Affiliations
Mengnan Chang
Key Laboratory of Luminescence & Optical Information, Ministry of Education, School of Physical Science and Engineering, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing 100044, China
Jiale Qian
Hunan Institute of Advanced Sensing and Information Technology, Xiangtan University, Xiangtan 411105, China
Zhaohui Li
Key Laboratory of Luminescence & Optical Information, Ministry of Education, School of Physical Science and Engineering, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing 100044, China
Xiaohan Cheng
Academy for Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China
Ying Wang
Key Laboratory of Luminescence & Optical Information, Ministry of Education, School of Physical Science and Engineering, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing 100044, China
Ling Fan
Key Laboratory of Luminescence & Optical Information, Ministry of Education, School of Physical Science and Engineering, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing 100044, China
Juexian Cao
Hunan Institute of Advanced Sensing and Information Technology, Xiangtan University, Xiangtan 411105, China
Li Ding
Key Laboratory for the Physics and Chemistry of Nanodevices and Center for Carbon-Based Electronics, School of Electronics, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China
Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are a type of nanomaterial that have excellent electrical properties such as high carrier mobility, high saturation velocity, and small inherent capacitance, showing great promise in radio frequency (RF) applications. Decades of development have been made mainly on cut-off frequency and amplification; however, frequency conversion for RF transceivers, such as CNT-based mixers, has been rarely reported. In this work, based on randomly oriented carbon nanotube films, we focused on exploring the frequency conversion capability of CNT-based RF mixers. CNT-based RF transistors were designed and fabricated with a gate length of 50 nm and gate width of 100 μm to obtain nearly 30 mA of total current and 34 mS of transconductance. The Champion RF transistor has demonstrated cut-off frequencies of 78 GHz and 60 GHz for fT and fmax, respectively. CNT-based mixers achieve high conversion gain from −11.4 dB to −17.5 dB at 10 to 15 GHz in the X and Ku bands. Additionally, linearity is achieved with an input third intercept (IIP3) of 18 dBm. It is worth noting that the results from this work have no matching technology or tuning instrument assistance, which lay the foundations for the application of Ku band transceivers integrated with CNT amplifiers.
