Surface-Mounted GaAs Active Splitter and Attenuator MMIC's Used in a 1-10-GHz Leveling Loop

A wide-band monolithic GaAs bridge-T variable attenuator has been used with a monolithic GaAs active power splitter to form a compact 1-10-GHz leveling loop having a minimum 9-dB leveling range with buffered output. The attenuator internally optimizes input and output return loss over a 1- 10-GHz bandwidth by the use of an on-chip GaAs op-amp. The active power splitter provides unity gain to each port over a 1-10-GHz bandwidth by the use of distributed amplification. The entire 4.5-cm by 4.2-cm subsystem was realized with surface mount packages on RT-Duroid®, demonstrating new construction techniques for GaAs MMIC assembly.