Air Bridge Gate FET for GaAs Monolithic Circuits

The paper describes a novel technology for producing micron and submicron gate FET devices, with improved gain and noise performances. The technique is particularly attractive for the production of very low noise devices and is very useful in monolithic circuit fabrication. In the production of high-power devices the technique has the advantage of not requiring complicated interdigitated structures. A noise figure improvement of 0.4 dB at 10 GHz was achieved using this technology. As an example of the developed technique, a two-stage monolithic preamplifier (2.8 dB N.F., 15 dB gain between 11.7 and 12.5 GHz) is described.