Ku-Band 50 W GaN HEMT Power Amplifier Using Asymmetric Power Combining of Transistor Cells

An Experimental and Systematic Insight into the Temperature Sensitivity for a 0.15-µm Gate-Length HEMT Based on the GaN Technology

Presently, growing attention is being given to the analysis of the impact of the ambient temperature on the GaN HEMT performance. The present article is aimed at investigating both DC and microwave characteristics of a GaN-based HEMT versus the ambient temperature using measured data, an equivalent-circuit model, and a sensitivity-based analysis. The tested device is a 0.15-μm ultra-short gate-length AlGaN/GaN HEMT with a gate width of 200 μm. The interdigitated layout of this device is based on four fingers, each with a length of 50 μm. The scattering parameters are measured from 45 MHz to 50 GHz with the ambient temperature varied from −40 °C to 150 °C. A systematic study of the temperature-dependent performance is carried out by means of a sensitivity-based analysis. The achieved findings show that by the heating the transistor, the DC and microwave performance are degraded, due to the degradation in the electron transport properties.

Compact 20-W GaN Internally Matched Power Amplifier for 2.5 GHz to 6 GHz Jammer Systems

In this paper, we demonstrate a compact 20-W GaN internally matched power amplifier for 2.5 to 6 GHz jammer systems which uses a high dielectric constant substrate, single-layer capacitors, and shunt/series resistors for low-Q matching and low-frequency stabilization. A GaN high-electron-mobility transistor (HEMT) CGH60030D bare die from Wolfspeed was used as an active device, and input/output matching circuits were implemented on two different substrates using a thin-film process, relative dielectric constants of which were 9.8 and 40, respectively. A series resistor of 2.1 Ω was chosen to minimize the high-frequency loss and obtain a flat gain response. For the output matching circuit, double λ/4 shorted stubs were used to supply the drain current and reduce the output impedance variation of the transistor between the low-frequency and high-frequency regions, which also made wideband matching feasible. Single-layer capacitors effectively helped reduce the size of the matching circuit. The fabricated GaN internally matched power amplifier showed a linear gain of about 10.2 dB, and had an output power of 43.3–43.9 dBm (21.4–24.5 W), a power-added efficiency of 33.4–49.7% and a power gain of 6.2–8.3 dB at the continuous-wave output power condition, from 2.5 to 6 GHz.