Low Cost Millimeter Wave Transmitter Based on SMT Techniques

The aim of this paper is to present a millimeter wave transmitter (Ka band) designed to be manufactured using low cost, surface mountable millimeter wave components onto soft PTFE based substrates. The system employs recently developed millimeter wave monolithic integrated circuits (MMICs) packaged in surface mountable Ball Grid Arrays (BGA) for the low power subsystems and surface mountable Land Grid Arrays (LM packages) for the driving power stages, mainly the power amplifiers. Tailored active bias servos are also employed to improve efficiency and reliability and to reduce adjustments and manufacturing costs also. Output power compression point of P1dB = 26dBm and Power Added Efficiency PAE=18 % have been measured at 31 GHz.