A High Integrated 13 W & 36 % PAE Ka band GaN MMIC Power Amplifier for SatCom Applications

This work presents a 13 W Ka-band GaN High Power Amplifier (HPA) operating in the 27-31.5 GHz bandwidth. This MMIC is developed using the qualified UMS 0.15 μm gate length GaN on 70 μm SiC substrate technology. Measurements in test fixture were performed over temperature in order to assess performance under Continuous Wave (CW) signal. At ambient chip backside temperature (Tb=25 °C), the HPA exhibits a small signal gain of 35 dB with a maximum Pout of 41.8 dBm, and a peak PAE of 32.5 % at 10 dBc for the quiescent bias point of V<inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">DQ</inf>=25 V and I<inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">DQ</inf>=60 mA/mm. For V<inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">DQ</inf>=22 V, this PAE increase up to 36 % with a 0.6 dB reduction of Pout. The HPA has a small chip size of 2.8 x 2.6 mm<sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> with only three biasing pads on each chip side. This HPA achieves among the best performances in terms of trade-off between Pout, gain, PAE and chip size.