Design of an MMIC Medium Power Amplifier at 47 GHz

An MMIC medium power amplifier is designed at 47 GHz with 0.15 μm gate length pHEMT-based GaAs process. An innovative topology with a novel biasing arrangement has been adopted to realize the MMIC amplifier with nominal active devices while maintaining efficient real estate utilisation. Simulation results show that the amplifier gives 16dB of small signal gain with 17.5 dBm output P1dB over 45-49 GHz. The amplifier is stabilized over 0 to 60 GHz by utilizing a feedback loop. The amplifier can be used to produce an LO signal in a W-band sub-harmonic mixer for cloud RADAR application.