A Ku-Band GaN-on-SiC Driver Amplifier for Radar Applications

This paper presents the design of a three-stage Ku-band driver amplifier (DA) based on WIN Semiconductors” 0.25 <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$\boldsymbol{\mu}\mathbf{m}$</tex> depletion mode GaN-on-SiC HEMT technology. Vigilant selection of HEMTs for various stages of DA MMIC and optimum design of the Land π matching networks resulted in achieving promising results. The proposed DA has a saturated output power of 3.2 Watts and PAE of 39% at 16.85 GHz in an overall die size of 2.5 mm x 0.78 mm. The small signal gain of the amplifier is more than 30 dB., and the power gain is greater than 26 dB., while input and output return losses are better than -10 dB and -15 dB., respectively., in the entire frequency band from 16.5 GHz to 17.2 GHz.