A Heterodyne Transceiver with Integrated Calibrator for K/Ka-Band Phased Arrays

This work presents a heterodyne K/Ka-band transceiver with integrated transmit (Tx)/receive (Rx) calibrator for satellite communication terminal antennas. To reduce the system complexity, the circuit features only three active mixers compared to four in conventional designs, which is also beneficial in terms of power consumption. The signal distribution requires a radio frequency (RF) switch, a local oscillator (LO) diplexer, and a power divider. The transceiver interfaces the back-end circuitry with merely three intermediate frequency (IF) signals and a dual-tone LO signal. Despite the reduced system complexity, it provides full-duplex communication at 20 GHz (Rx) and 30 GHz (Tx) as well as sequential calibration for the Rx and the Tx antennas. The demonstrator realized in standard printed circuit board technology is compact enough to meet phased array requirements and fully verifies the desired functionality.