Performance and applications of a 1-element HBT grid amplifier

Author

Rutledge, David B. ; Kim, Mconil ; Sovero, Emilio A. ; Lisio, Michael P De ; Hacker, Jonathan B. ; Chiao, Jung-Chih ; Li, Shi-Jie ; Gagnon, David R. ; Rosenberg, James J.

Author_Institution

Div. of Eng. & Appl. Sci., California Inst. of Technol., Pasadena, CA, USA

Volume

1

fYear

1993

fDate

1993

Firstpage

13881

Abstract

A 100-element 10-GHz grid amplifier has been developed. The active devices in the grid are chips with heterojunction bipolar transistor (HBT) differential pairs that include a resistive network to provide self-bias to the base. The planar metal grid structure was empirically designed to provide effective coupling between the HBTs and free space. The peak gain of the grid was 10 dB at 10 GHz with a 3 dB bandwidth of 1 GHz. The input and output matches are better than 15 dB at 10 GHz. The maximum output power is 450 mW, and the minimum noise figure is 7 dB. Tests show that the grid is quite tolerant of failures-the output power dropped by only 1 dB when the 10% of the inputs were detuned. The device amplifies beams with incidence angles up to 30° with less than a 3-dB drop in power. By providing external feedback with a twist reflector, the grid amplifier can be used as a broadband tunable source. This source could be tuned from 6.5 GHz to 11.5 GHz with a peak effective radiated power (ERP) of 6.3 W at 9.9 GHz

Keywords

MMIC amplifiers; bipolar integrated circuits; circuit tuning; feedback amplifiers; heterojunction bipolar transistors; 1 GHz; 10 dB; 200 element array; 450 mW; 6.3 W; 6.5 to 11.5 GHz; 7 dB; HBT grid amplifier; broadband tunable source; differential pairs; external feedback; heterojunction bipolar transistor; planar metal grid structure; resistive network; self-bias; twist reflector; Bandwidth; Broadband amplifiers; Enterprise resource planning; Feedback; Heterojunction bipolar transistors; Impedance matching; Noise figure; Power amplifiers; Power generation; Testing;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Microwave Conference Proceedings, 1993. APMC '93., 1993 Asia-Pacific

Conference_Location

Hsinchu

Print_ISBN

0-7803-1352-6

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/APMC.1993.468469

Filename

468469