Due to the increasing demand of broadband capability and reconfigurability for mobile applications, there is an enormous interest to develop appropriate analog receiver front-ends. In this respect, one promising candidate group is the Six-Port-based direct conversion receiver. The presented work focuses on the investigation of Six-Port-based mobile receiver front-ends with their specific systematical signal processing. Thereby, issues of spurious interfering signals which are generated within the down conversion process of such receivers are of special interest. Based on a comprehensive description of the analog signal processing within additive frequency conversion, a reason could be identified why existing Six-Port receivers have not found any practical application in mobile communication yet – the dynamic DC-offset. With this insight compensation techniques were developed to overcome the negative influences of the dynamic DC-offset. Furthermore, this work presents novel Six-Port-based receiver architectures which, on the one hand, keep the advantages of additive mixing systems like: low power consumption, broadband capability and simplicity of implementation especially for mm-wave transmissions. On the other hand, these novel architectures comprise compensation techniques such that systematically generated spurious signals are inherently compensated in the analog part of the receiver. Moreover, the influence of impairments of phase and amplitude within the IQ-branches of a receiver was investigated. The resulting, unwanted IQ-imbalance was shown to be a mixing method (multiplicative or additive) independent spurious effect. It is suggested to compensate for IQ-imbalance in the digital part of the receiver system. This can be realized with the use of adaptive algorithms. The comparison with conventional analog receiver architectures (especially homodyne receivers) with respect to the reception of today’s and future digitally modulated transmission signals indicate the proposed Six-Port-based receiver architectures to be suitable candidates to fulfill the difficult tasks of modern mobile communication.

This doctoral thesis is focused on problems of modulators based on six-ports. It begins with description of current state of the art of six-ports used like modulators, their transfer functions and SIW technology. A design part of this thesis consists from experimental six-port based on substrate integrated waveguide (SIW) technology. There is presented step-by-step development of this six-port using this technology and also there is introduced micro-strip technology based six-port. Final design of six-ports and variable impedances were measured, the results are discussed and compared with expected ones in next chapters. Second part of this thesis deals with influences of internal parameters of six-ports to final signal transmission and derives theirs transfer functions for more than one reflection in structure. The computation results are compared with experimental measurements for fixed loads. With using of ideal loads sweeps, modulations with shaped input signals were calculated. For designed variables impedances, there was founded the optimal biasing points for demanded IQ diagram and discussed which from tested active circuit is suitable. In the last part there are shown results of experiment with these variable loads connected to both types of designed six-ports.