A 39.7 dBm and 18.5% PAE compact X to Ku band GaN Travelling Wave Amplifier

Author

Dupuy, Victor ; Kerherve, Eric ; Deltimple, Nathalie ; Plaze, Jean-Philippe ; Dueme, Philippe ; Mallet-Guy, Benoit ; Mancuso, Y.

Author_Institution

IMS Lab., Univ. of Bordeaux, Talence, France

fYear

2014

fDate

3-6 Aug. 2014

Firstpage

611

Lastpage

614

Abstract

This article presents an 8GHz to 18GHz Travelling Wave Amplifier (TWA) averaging 39.7dBm of output power and 18.5% Power Added Efficiency (PAE). At 11 GHz, the TWA reaches a peak output power 40.4dBm and a peak PAE of 22%. The proposed architecture consists in the combination of two TWAs in parallel to increase output power. An innovative low loss compact power combiner is proposed to reduce the overall die size and keep high PAE. The amplifier presented here has the advantage to be very compact compared to similar MMICs High Power Amplifiers (HPA). An innovative design methodology based on a strong correlation between the amplifier and the combiner design is introduced.

Keywords

III-V semiconductors; MMIC power amplifiers; gallium compounds; power combiners; travelling wave amplifiers; wide band gap semiconductors; GaN; MMIC HPA; PAE; compact X to Ku band TWA; efficiency 18.5 percent; efficiency 22 percent; frequency 8 GHz to 18 GHz; high power amplifiers; innovative low loss compact power combiner; power added efficiency; travelling wave amplifier; Bandwidth; Gallium nitride; Impedance matching; MMICs; Power amplifiers; Power combiners; Power generation; GaN; MMIC; Power combining; TWA;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Circuits and Systems (MWSCAS), 2014 IEEE 57th International Midwest Symposium on

Conference_Location

College Station, TX

ISSN

1548-3746

Print_ISBN

978-1-4799-4134-6

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/MWSCAS.2014.6908489

Filename

6908489