A Highly-Efficient Power Amplifier for V-band Inter-Satellite Link Applications

This paper presents the design of a V-band power amplifier for millimeter-wave satellite communication with high efficiency. Through theoretical analysis on the variation of input impedance, the operating bandwidth was effectively expanded with the adoption of RC feedback network at the second stage transistor. Although designing beyond 80% of the unit-currentgain cutoff frequency ($\mathrm{f}_{\mathrm{T}}$), the power-added-efficiency (PAE) was enhanced through the utilization of band-pass filtering matching network. With the implementation using commercial $0.15-\mu \mathrm{m}$ GaAs pseudomorphic high electron mobility transistor (pHEMT) technology, the fabricated power amplifier (PA) has demonstrated a linear gain of greater than 12.2 dB, a maximum output power ($\mathrm{P}_{\mathrm{sat}}$) of larger than 15 dBm, and a PAE of better than 16% from 51 to 58 GHz, respectively.