A Ku-Band 40W GaN Power Amplifier MMIC for Satellite Communication

A Ku-band high power amplifier (HPA) MMIC is designed based on 0.15 μm GaN HEMT process. To improve the HPA efficiency, a compact and concise 16-way power synthesis network is applied to reduce the insertion loss of match networks. Meanwhile, the optimal third-order intermodulation distortion (IMD3) impedance is taken into account to improve the linearity. The measured results under continuous wave (CW) excitation show that the power-added efficiency (PAE) is more than 36% with output power over 46dBm (40W) among 13-15.5 GHz, while the IMD3 is better than -24 dBc at 40dBm output power (two tones) back-off (PBO). The total chip size is 3.7×5.9mm
²
.