A 50 MHz to 6 GHz 1-Watt GaAs pHEMT Stacked Distributed Power Amplifier

Abstract

In this paper, a 0.5–6 GHz power amplifier (PA) is designed using a 0.15 μm GaAs pHEMT process, which employs 4-distributed 2-stacked-FETs to obtain a broadband power performance and wideband power gain. Biasing with a 12 V drain voltage, this PA shows measurement results of about 1-watt output power in the frequency range of 0.5–6 GHz with corresponding power added efficiency of 22–29%. The measured S-parameters show a very flat gain (S21) of 17±0.3 dB, a maximum input return loss (S11) of −13 dB, a maximum output return loss (S22) of −15 dB. The chip occupies a small chip size of 3×1.6 mm2.