A 1.6 Watt high efficiency 7-11 GHz power MMIC

A two-stage MBE (molecular beam epitaxy) monolithic power amplifier is reported with excellent performance in power and power-added-efficiency (PAE) over the entire frequency band of 7-11 GHz. The monolithic chip contains full interstage matching and partial input matching. When matched to 50 ohms at both input and output using simple off-chip circuitry, the MMIC demonstrates best overall performance of 32 dBm (0.44 W/mm), 33%, and 13.7 dB of power, PAE, and associated gain at a gain compression of 2 dB. These values are the minimum across the entire 40% bandwidth. The average performance from 11 devices from 3 wafers is a power of 31 dBm, PAE of 30%, and 2-dB compressed gain of at least 10.5 dB across the band. Conservative design coupled with a partial monolithic implementation resulted in a relatively small die size of 0.083"*0.046".<>