High efficiency and low distortion GaN MMIC power amplifier for 7 Ghz applications

Abstract

The guidelines for designing a high efficiency and low distortion 2-stages Gallium Nitride (GaN) power amplifier (PA) are presented. In particular, the developed approach to mitigate the phase distortion (AM/PM) without worsening the efficiency and gain features is adopted to design a 7GHz PA based on 0.25 µm GaN process from TriQuint. When tested with continuous wave signals the PA shows a saturated output power higher than 37 dBm, with an efficiency larger than 60% and an AM/AM and AM/PM distortions lower than 2 dB and ±1 deg, respectively. The MMIC chip size is 3×3mm2.