A 1/2 Watt High Linearity and Wide Bandwidth PHEMT Driver Amplifier MMIC for Millimeter-Wave Applications

This paper presents a high linearity and wide bandwidth driver/power amplifier MMIC, which covered entire Q-band. The MMIC amplifier was designed for 38GHz point-to-point radio application using TriQuint´s 0.15 mum power GaAs PHEMT technology. This balanced three-stage power amplifier, with chip size of 2.9 mm² on 100 mum GaAs substrate, achieved 27 dBm P1dB output power with nominal 18 dB small signal gain over 33-40 GHz. The RF performance of this power amplifier can be further extended to cover frequencies of 33-48 GHz. Meanwhile, high output linearity was measured with lower than -34 dBc third order intermodulation (IM3) at 19 dBm per tone output power level. This state-of-the-art millimeter wave power amplifier sets the benchmark of linearity and bandwidth for a single MMIC chip reported to date among Q-band medium power amplifiers