A 23.2dBm at 210GHz to 21.0dBm at 235GHz 16-Way PA-Cell Combined InP HBT SSPA MMIC

A 3-stage, 16-way PA-cell combined InP HBT solidstate power amplifier MMIC is presented demonstrating 23.2dBm (208.7mW) Pout at 210GHz to 21.0dBm (126.0mW) at 235GHz for 10dBm Pin - this represents 13.2-11.0dB large-signal gain. The total high-power bandwidth of this SSPA is between 190.8-237GHz. The amplifier has 24.3-26.7dB S21 gain from 206243GHz. The total PDC is 5.81W. A power-cascode cell topology is used for the PA unit cell, which is used to generate a 3-Stage, 4Cell output combined SSPA - then four of these 4-Cell SSPAs are combined using low insertion loss Wilkinson dividers and combiners to realize the overall 16-way PA cell combined MMIC. This is the first reported SSPA MMIC demonstrating > 200mW Pout above 200GHz operation. The output powers from this work across 190.8-237GHz are the highest values reported from an SSPA MMIC and improves upon state-of-the-art by 1.16-1.6× from 190.8-225GHz and by 1.6× from 230-235GHz. This result closely meets or exceeds across the same frequency operation the highest Pout reported from a solid-state based PA, a four-chip waveguide-block combined module.