Active HEMT Based Envelope Detector for Ultra-Wideband Wireless Communication Systems

This paper reports on an ultra-wideband (UWB) envelope detector (ED) based on a high electron mobility transistor (HEMT). The ED has a single-ended architecture and consists of an input matching network, a HEMT as the rectifying element, biasing networks and a low pass filter (LPF). A prototype of the ED was manufactured in microstrip technology. Experimental results show that the ED can successfully demodulate amplitude shift keying (ASK) signals up to 2.5 Gbps at 5–9 GHz carrier frequencies. The ED achieves error free transmissions at 2.5 Gbps for 6 GHz carrier frequency, which corresponds to a bit rate to frequency carrier of 41.7%. Furthermore, the ED shows outstanding performance in terms of conversion loss, even reaching a gain of 2.5 dB at 6 GHz with a modulated signal of -15 dBm of carrier power.