The Enhanced Power Performance of the Dual-Fed Distributed Amplifier

The small signal advantages of the dual-fed distributed amplifier are known (Ref.l). This paper gives practical results for the large signal behaviour showing a 3 dB improvement in the output power at 1 dB gain compression and a 7 dB improvement in the 3rd order intercept point. Two HMF-0600 MESFETs are used in the design to give 27 dBm output power over the 2 to 7 GHz band. A second version uses two higher power HMF-1200 devices to give 30 dBm output power over the 1 to 13 GHz band. Due to the use of the distributed amplifier technique, the circuits are relatively insensitive to device variations and therefore no circuit tuning is required during fabrication.