A 30MHz-3GHz 1W stacked-FET GaAs MMIC power amplifier

Abstract

In this letter, a 30 MHz-3 GHz 1 W ultra-broadband stacked power amplifier (PA) fabricated in 0.25 um GaAs pHEMT technology process is presented. By inserting an RC network between the bridge-T input lossy matching network and the stacked-FET, the stability enhancement and input standing wave ratio (SWR) optimization are achieved with high frequency gain compensation. Based on the performance simulations of the stacked-PA with various normalized output load impedance, an optimal output matching method is applied, which obtains 31±1 dBm output power at 15 dBm input power, while the peak PAE achieves 60.2% at 30 MHz and the PAE larger than 35% over all of the operating frequency band. Moreover, the size of MMIC PA achieves 1.51 mm 2 with 50 Ω input and output matching.