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 mu m gate length GaN on 70 mu m 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 degrees 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-DQ=25 V and I-DQ=60 mA/mm. For V-DQ=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(2) 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.