Publication: Printed circuit board design for mixer characterisation
Loading...
Date
2012-06-01
Authors
Rajkumar, Pushpanathan
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract
In this undergraduate project, a PCB for an upconverter mixer is designed to operate at RF frequency of 2.5 GHz using MAXIM’s MAX2671 chip. The design is based on MAX2671 evaluation kit model as the reference. Four important methods have been used in designingthe PCB which are characteristic impedance matching, copper trace width determination, PCB layout design and parasitic elements (RLC) extraction. An L-section matching network using lumped components is done to match the PCB to characteristic impedance of 50 Ω. The return loss, S11, obtained is about -27 dB. Since this project is related to RF signals, the transmission line width is found to be 1.84 mm by using RO3003 board. The PCB layout is designed using 2-layer design topology since the circuit requires only 11 components and thus the dimension of the PCB is 52.1×48.76 mm. The parasitic elements that exist in the microstrip line are extracted. As a result, capacitance and inductance is found to have between 8 to 39 % difference when their respective calculated values are compared with the equivalent simulated values. This shows that parasitic elements do exist although the frequency used is only 2.5 GHz and therefore the effect of RLC in RF boards must be considered.