A Compact 16 Watt X-Band GaN-MMIC Power Amplifier

GaN MMIC power amplifiers for X-band applications are presented delivering more than 16 W of W output power while being extremely small in chip size. With a single-device amplifier on a 1.8times2.2 mm
²
chip 7.8 W output power at 8 GHz are achieved with a maximum PAE of 44%. On a chip of 2.2times3.3 mm
²
size only, a two-stage amplifier is realized with 18 dB of linear gain and 16 W output power at 8 GHz. PAE of the MMIC reaches 30%