MMICs and front end module design with selectively anodized aluminum substrate

Highly integrated front end module (FEM) with selectively anodized aluminum substrate was proposed and designed from 2.3 GHz to 2.5 GHz for WiMAX/Wibro applications. It consists of a MMIC power amplifier (PA), a MMIC SPDT switch, and a LPF with integrated passive device (IPD) on the substrate. The PA and the SPDT switch were designed with 2 μm GaAs HBT process and 0.5 μm InGaAs pHEMT process, respectively. The performance of the PA is comparable with commercial WiMAX products. The FEM has the gain of 30.3 dB and EVM of 2.6 % at 23 dBm FEM linear output power with the help of aluminum substrate's good thermal dissipation, and its compact size is 4 × 5 mm
²
.