Advancements and Challenges in Sub-Harmonic Mixer Technology for High-Speed, Low-Power Communication Systems

Abstract - The wireless communication technologies have been growing rapidly especially in the areas of 5G, IoT, and satellite communications and this has produced piles of pressure on the performance requirements of RF frontend receivers, especially to deliver high-bandwidth, broadband performance, low power. Sub-harmonic mixers can be seen as a major improvement in addressing these requirements in that they can be used to advantage over standard mixers in that they can operate at sub-multiple frequencies than the local oscillator (LO). This gives low power usage, a linearity improvement and an overall sensitivity rise in the receiver. Nonetheless, issues of retaining linearity, noise figure optimization, and low power consumption among others are important areas of future investigation. This paper presents a discussion about the design, the strengths, and weaknesses of subharmonic mixers used in contemporary communication systems, and the authors review different reports and compare their performance in the major parameters, conversion loss, linearity, bandwidth, and power consumption. Comparison of the role of sub-harmonic mixers in the shape of high-performance, low-power wireless communications in the future is examined, and how the mixers can be incorporated into the nextgeneration systems.