A 3-W, 25 dB Gain, 40 % PAE Three-Stage Ka-Band MMIC Power Amplifier

This paper presents the design performance continuous wave (CW) Monolithic Microwave Integrated Circuit (MMIC) Power Amplifier (PA) with greater than 3 Watt output power, implemented in a 150 nm GaN-grown on-SiC HEMT process. The power amplifier (PA) features three cascaded stages, each progressively increasing the RF power level from 10 dBm to 35 dBm, while maintaining over 40% power added efficiency (PAE) over the frequency range of 24 to 26 GHz. This proposed 3-stage mmic is realized in UMS 150-nm GaN on SiC process.