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International Journal of Infrared and Millimeter Waves

A Novel LO Power Injection Method for SIS Mixers

Kecheng Xiao, Hideo Ogawa, Yasuo Fukui

Published Jan 1, 2002• 1 citation
Publisher
DOI
10.1023/a:1015029800254

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In millimeter and submillimeter wave band, radio telescopes' observing efficiency and weak signal detecting capability have been greatly raised in the past tens of years, due to the application of the SIS mixers as their receiver front-ends. However general local power injection methods for a heterodyne receiver usually result in additional insertion loss which degrades sensitivity of SIS receivers. Based on the extremely small local power requirements of SIS quantum mixing, we developed a novel LO path built-in SIS mixer, in which an additional waveguide was built for LO power injection. Without any of traditional external LO diplexers (e.g., crossguide- couplers or beamsplitters), LO power is provided to SIS junctions through the LO waveguide and the junction chip which connects both LO- and signal waveguides. There is no RF signal lost due to coupling LO power since LO- and RF signal take different paths before arriving at junctions, resulting in a compact, stable and lower loss SIS receiver system. Experiments at 110- and 230 GHz bands show that there is no any problem to couple sufficient pumping power to SIS junctions from general LO sources for present LPB mixer, and the receiver sensitivities have a further improvement of about 10 K compared to our previous beamsplitter LO power coupling receiver system. We expect this LPB SIS mixer can be also applied into submillimeter wave band.

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In millimeter and submillimeter wave band, radio telescopes' observing efficiency and weak signal detecting capability have been greatly raised in the past tens of years, due to the application of the SIS mixers as their receiver front-ends. However general local power injection methods for a heterodyne receiver usually result in additional insertion loss which degrades sensitivity of SIS receivers. Based on the extremely small local power requirements of SIS quantum mixing, we developed a novel LO path built-in SIS mixer, in which an additional waveguide was built for LO power injection. Without any of traditional external LO diplexers (e.g., crossguide- couplers or beamsplitters), LO power is provided to SIS junctions through the LO waveguide and the junction chip which connects both LO- and signal waveguides. There is no RF signal lost due to coupling LO power since LO- and RF signal take different paths before arriving at junctions, resulting in a compact, stable and lower loss SIS receiver system. Experiments at 110- and 230 GHz bands show that there is no any problem to couple sufficient pumping power to SIS junctions from general LO sources for present LPB mixer, and the receiver sensitivities have a further improvement of about 10 K compared to our previous beamsplitter LO power coupling receiver system. We expect this LPB SIS mixer can be also applied into submillimeter wave band.
We present the design and first experimental results of a 385-500 GHz fixed-tuned double sideband (DSB) receiver based on a superconductor-insulator-superconductor (SIS) junction mixer with on-chip LO injection circuitry. At high frequency, branch waveguide couplers are difficult to manufacture with required accuracy as the branches (slots) become extremely narrow. In order to solve this problem, we propose a coupler integrated onto the mixer chip and fabricated together with the SIS junction and the tuning circuitry. The on-chip LO directional coupler is made of superconducting lines with slot lines in the ground plane. Thus, the coupler is integrated into conventional SIS junction fabrication steps, benefiting from the processing accuracy better than 0.5 μm by using optical lithography only. Furthermore, the mixer design includes a novel component, an ellipse termination for the idle LO port, made of thin-film resistive material. This termination gives very broadband performance using a compact area. Moreover, it is very tolerant to the sheet resistivity of the film, geometry and does not require any physical grounding [1]. The mixer is to be used at the Atacama Pathfinder EXperiment (APEX) telescope in Chile [2].
We report the design of a 230 GHz dual-polarization (2-pol) balanced Superconductor-Insulator-Superconductor (SIS) receiver that can be easily extended for large array applications. We achieve this by integrating all of the required radio frequency (RF) and local oscillator (LO) components on-chip using planar superconducting circuit technology, therefore simplifying the architecture of the receiver block substantially. One major feature of our design is the planar LO injection scheme, which couples the LO with a single on-chip antenna and distributes the LO power via a series of microstrip couplers to the balanced mixers of each polarization of each pixel. In this paper, we describe in detail the design and layout of the individual planar circuit components of our receiver, as well as how they are integrated to form a full receiver. We then conclude the paper with the design of a 2-pixel array demonstrator, illustrating how the balanced SIS mixer and the LO distribution network can be extended to form an even larger array.