A 1/2 Watt High Linearity and Wide Bandwidth PHEMT Driver Amplifier MMIC for Millimeter-Wave Applications

Abstract

This paper presents a high linearity and wide bandwidth driver/power amplifier MMIC, which covered entire Q-band. The MMIC amplifier was designed for 38GHz Point-toPoint radio application using TriQuint's 0.15 gm power GaAs PHEMT technology. This balanced three-stage power amplifier, with chip size of 2.9 mm2 on 100 gm GaAs substrate, achieved 27 dBm P1dB output power with nominal 18 dB small signal gain over 33 -40 GHz. The RF performance of this power amplifier can be further extended to cover frequencies of 33 -48 GHz. Meanwhile, high output linearity was measured with lower than -34 dBc third order intermodulation (IM3) at 19 dBm per tone output power level. This state-of-the-art millimeter wave power amplifier sets the benchmark of linearity and bandwidth for a single MMIC chip reported to date among Q-band medium power amplifiers.

The Design and Thermal Reliability Analysis of a High-Efficiency K-Band MMIC Medium-Power Amplifier with Multiharmonic Matching

“…GaAs monolithic microwave integrated circuit (MMIC) power amplifier (PA) design is a cutting-edge technology, which is widely used in the fields of communication [1][2][3], point-to-point network [4,5], phased array radar system [6], and so forth. The trend of GaAs MMIC PA development is aiming at small size, high efficiency, and high reliability [7][8][9][10].…”