Class F GaN power amplifiers for CubeSat communication links

Author

Chin, Andrew ; Clark, Christopher

Author_Institution

Aerosp. Corp., Los Angeles, CA, USA

fYear

2012

fDate

3-10 March 2012

Firstpage

1

Lastpage

6

Abstract

The Aerospace Corporation (Aerospace) CubeSat program has designed a 10 Watt, inverse Class F Gallium Nitride (GaN) power amplifier currently installed and in use in CubeSat mobile ground stations. At 915 MHz and 2 dB compression, the amplifier has 17.0 dB of gain, 40.4 dBm output power, and 83.4% Power Added Efficiency (PAE). This amplifier was designed in Advanced Design System (ADS) with a vendor transistor model and optimized transmission line matching networks. A miniaturized lumped element version is currently being designed for implementation in future CubeSats. Such an amplifier will yield significant power savings and improved link margin for a system with very tight size, weight, and power (SWaP) restrictions.

Keywords

III-V semiconductors; UHF power amplifiers; gallium compounds; mobile radio; satellite communication; wide band gap semiconductors; ADS; CubeSat communication links; CubeSat mobile ground stations; GaN; PAE; advanced design system; aerospace corporation CubeSat program; class F power amplifiers; efficiency 83.4 percent; frequency 915 MHz; gain 17.0 dB; improved link margin; inverse class F gallium nitride power amplifier; miniaturized lumped element version; optimized transmission line matching networks; power 10 W; power added efficiency; vendor transistor model; Gain; Gallium nitride; Harmonic analysis; Power amplifiers; Power generation; Radio frequency; Transistors;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Aerospace Conference, 2012 IEEE

Conference_Location

Big Sky, MT

ISSN

1095-323X

Print_ISBN

978-1-4577-0556-4

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/AERO.2012.6187136

Filename

6187136