The article presents a novel method of protecting RF ports designed to handle high (>30dBm) power levels. An Enhancement mode (E-mode) pHEMT clamp consists of Field effect transistor (FET) with a resistor connected between gate and source. Our design consists of two such clamps connected in back to back configuration. The structure was connected to the Transmit (TX) port of a WiFi front end module (WiFi FEM). Transmission line pulsing (TLP) and Human Body Model (HBM) testing was used to characterize the clamp. The low capacitance (<100fF) along with high trigger voltage (±21V) makes this clamp a suitable candidate for protecting high power RF ports.
This paper presents a 1mm 2 monolithic microwave integrated circuit (MMIC) LNA/SP2T switch front end module (FEM) solution based on E/D mode GaAs pHEMT technology for WLAN 802.11a applications. The proposed FEM has a two stage Enhancement-mode pHEMT LNA and Depletion-Mode pHEMT SP2T switch fully integrated on a single die with an area of 0.916x0.95mm 2 . The SP2T switch in the FEM enables WLAN transmit (TX) and receive (RX) at 4.9-5.85GHz. The receive path has an LNA with bypass mode which is controlled by a 1 bit LNA Enable control. At 3.3V supply, the FEM in the RX LNA path shows a 2.1dB noise figure with 16dB typical gain including the switch loss, the measured input third order intercept point (IIP3) and output third order intercept point (OIP3) are 2dBm and 18dBm respectively. The module has an RX DC blocking cap and VDD bypass cap integrated on die which reduces BoM count and cost for the end customer. The final die is in a 2x2mm QFN package and it passes 1000V ESD human body model (HBM).
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