A broadband high gain driver amplifier with gain compensation for current-reuse

This paper proposes a broadband high-gain driver amplifier (DA) monolithic microwave integrated circuit (MMIC) for wireless communication . Current reuse and a new gain compensation method are applied in the design of proposed DA MMIC to achieve the performance of high gain, low in-band gain ripple , and high output power across a wide operational bandwidth. To ensure the power capability, both the output stage and the driver stage are designed based on load-pull analysis, which inevitably results in gain non-uniformity. However, with the application of the proposed gain compensation method to the first-stage amplification circuit, the gain non-uniformity of both the driver and output stages is ultimately compensated for. For verification, the proposed DA is fabricated in 0.15 μm gallium arsenide (GaAs) high electron mobility transistor (pHEMT) technology with a chip area of 4.2 mm 2 . The measured results demonstrate a small signal gain over 32 dB, a saturated output power over 26 dBm, a power gain greater than 30 dB, an power added efficiency (PAE) exceeding 25 %, and in-band gain ripple of approximately ±0.8 dB from 2 to 18 GHz. The proposed DA MMIC has a static power consumption of 0.95 W and dynamic power consumption less than 1.3 W.