A 50 W CW 1–6 GHz GaN MMIC Power Amplifier Module with Greater than 30 % Power Added Efficiency

This paper presents the design and measurement of a 1 – 6 GHz GaN MMIC power amplifier module. The MMIC PAs and power combiner are fabricated on 100µm silicon carbide using Qorvo's QGaN25 released process. A two-stage non-uniform distributed power amplifier with an output transformer is implemented as the core amplifier to achieve excellent power, PAE and bandwidth. Two core amplifiers are combined in parallel within the package module using a separately realized power combiner die, which is also used as the input splitter. The integrated power amplifier package module produces 42.7 – 60.3 W of CW output power over the 1 – 6 GHz band with 30.4 - 42.9 % PAE and 23.3 – 24.8 dB gain using a 32 V supply voltage all within a 15.24 mm × 15.24 mm footprint.