A family of low cost high performance HEMT MMICs for commercial DBS applications

A family of GaAs HEMT MMICs have been developed for use in Direct Broadcast Satellite TV (DBS) US, Japanese, and European markets. These designs are very compact, high performance, and self-biased. They are meant as building blocks for low noise block (LNB) downconverters. Described in this paper are the receiver chip, low noise amplifier, and self-biased single HEMT device (should a MIC LNA be preferred). The key design is the receiver chip with a nominal gain of 38 dB and NF of less than 3 dB for the US band. This paper presents a description of each design, a performance summary, as well as information describing their actual use in an LNB design.<>