Parametric Downconverter for Mixer-First Receiver Front Ends

In this article, we present a parametric downconverter that may be used in a mixer-first receiver front end. In such a receiver, the first mixer should offer a satisfactory low-noise figure (NF), high conversion gain (CG) to suppress the noise contribution of the next stages, and high linearity to avoid receiver saturation in the presence of interferences. Parametric mixers are known to offer para...