Pairing Mixers with Reflectionless Filters to Improve System Performance

Traditional filter designs employ circuits which reject undesired signals by reflecting them back to the source. There are many applications in which these reflections produce intermodulation products, gain ripples and other problems in system performance. Non-linear devices such as mixers respond to out-of-band frequencies and are highly sensitive to the reflections caused by conventional filter designs. This becomes especially challenging as filters are often needed near or adjacent to mixers to better define bandwidth or suppress unwanted harmonics.