Resistive Graphene FET Subharmonic Mixers: Noise and Linearity Assessment

We report on the first complete RF characterization of graphene field-effect transistor subharmonic resistive mixers in the frequency interval 2–5 GHz. The analysis includes conversion loss (CL), noise figure (NF), and intermodulation distortion. Due to an 8-nm thin Al2O3 gate dielectric, the devices operate at only 0 dBm of local oscillator (LO) power with an optimum measured CL in the range of 20–22 dB. The NF closely mimics the CL, thus determining the noise to be essentially thermal in origin, which is promising for cryogenic applications. The highest input third-order intercept point is measured to be 4.9 dBm at an LO power of 2 dBm