A 3-W High-Power 32-GHz GaAs Power Amplifier

A 3-W high power 31.5-33.5GHz millimeter-wave monolithic microwave integrated circuit (MMIC) power amplifier (PA) based on a 0.13μm GaAs PHEMT technology is presented in this paper. The proposed power amplifier adopts class-AB topology with dedicated RC parallel networks for impedance matching and stability enhancement. The output matching network is elaborately designed to improve the linearity with only 0.2dB power loss. To further increase the saturated output power, two identical power amplifiers as mentioned above are combined with two Lange couplers for input power division and output power combination. With the above-mentioned ideas, the proposed balanced power amplifier was designed and fabricated with excellent overall measurement performance including output power, power gain, PAE, linearity, and input/output matching. The measured output power is very high, which is up to 35dBm (3W) with power added efficiency of around 28% to 33% and power gain of around 28dB in the frequency range of 31.5-33.5GHz. The input and output ports are properly matched with measured S11 and S22 better than -24dB. In general, compared with the Ka-band designs in literature, the proposed power amplifier has superior output power and reasonable overall performance.