Low power consumption millimeter-wave amplifiers using InP HEMT technology

We designed and fabricated an X-band low noise amplifier (LNA), a millimeter-wave broadband amplifier and a W-band amplifier MMICs in this paper. The amplifiers were fabricated with the ETH 0.1 μm InP HEMT coplanar waveguide (CPW) MMIC process. With an ultra low DC power consumption of 1.1 mW, the X-band LNA exhibits a gain of 9.5 ± 1.0 dB from 6.2 to 11 GHz and a minimum noise figure of 1.5 dB at 9.8 GHz. The broadband amplifier exhibits gains greater than 17 dB from 27.5 to 83 GHz, with a DC power consumption of only 13.1 mW. A W-band amplifier with a gain of 21.2 ± 1.5 dB from 90 to 102 GHz was also demonstrated in the paper. The performance of the amplifiers is enabled by the excellent characteristics of our InP HEMTs under low-power dissipation biases.