Astronomy receiver
AssigneeUnited States of America as represented by the Administrator of NASA
InventorBerhanu T. Bulcha
Life of this patent
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Abstract
A waveguide receiver apparatus includes a power splitter circuit with an attenuation card; a mixer circuit coupled to an output of the power splitter circuit; and an antenna assembly coupled to an output of the mixer circuit. The aspects of the disclosed embodiments provide a highly compact and sensitive 500-600 GHz, 1×8 receiver array, with a conversion loss of less than approximately 11 decibels (dB), a noise temperature of less than 2000 degrees Kelvin (K) at 540 GHz, and a wide intermediate frequency (IF) bandwidth of approximately 70 Gigahertz (GHz).
Claims20
A waveguide receiver apparatus comprising:
- a 1×8 receiver array disposed on a waveguide substrate, the receiver array comprising a first circuit branch and a second circuit branch, wherein the first circuit branch and the second circuit branch each comprise:
- a first splitter circuit configured to divide an input signal;
- a first Tripler circuit coupled to a first output of the first splitter circuit and a second Tripler circuit coupled to a second output of the first splitter circuit;
- a second splitter circuit coupled to an output of the first Tripler circuit and a third splitter circuit coupled to an output of the second Tripler circuit;
- a first mixer circuit coupled to a first output of the second splitter circuit and a second mixer circuit coupled to a second output of the second splitter circuit;
- a third mixer circuit coupled to a first output of the third splitter circuit and a fourth mixer circuit coupled to a second output of the third splitter circuit;
- a first antenna coupled to an output of the first mixer circuit;
- a second antenna coupled to an output of the second mixer circuit;
- a third antenna coupled to an output of the third mixer circuit;
- and
- a fourth antenna coupled to an output of the fourth mixer circuit.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.