A 100W High Efficiency Hybrid Broadband GaN Power Amplifier for Galileo Navigation System

This paper presents the design and experimental characterization of a broadband hybrid high power amplifier (HPA) for L-band applications. The HPA has been optimized to work efficiently in the three sub-bands (E5, E6 and E1) dedicated to Galileo navigation system $(\mathrm{f}=1192 \pm 46 \mathrm{MHz}, \mathrm{f}=1278 \pm 25 \mathrm{MHz}$ and $f=1575 \pm 25 \mathrm{MHz}$, respectively), showing promising results. The HPA exploits a hermetic packaged device with an active periphery of 25.4 mm, developed in the $0.5 \mu \mathrm{m}$ gate length GaN/SiC HEMT process (GH50-20) available at United Monolithic Semiconductor (UMS) foundry. Experimental results shown output power even larger than 100 W with associated power added efficiency and gain of 60% and 14 dB, in more than a 35% of fractional bandwidth in L-Band. Indeed, the realized HPA shows very flat performance all along the frequency range from 1.14 GHz to 1.6 GHz, also achieving a quite good agreement between measurements and simulations.