A 39.7 dBm and 18.5% PAE compact X to Ku band GaN Travelling Wave Amplifier

This article presents an 8GHz to 18GHz Travelling Wave Amplifier (TWA) averaging 39.7dBm of output power and 18.5% Power Added Efficiency (PAE). At 11 GHz, the TWA reaches a peak output power 40.4dBm and a peak PAE of 22%. The proposed architecture consists in the combination of two TWAs in parallel to increase output power. An innovative low loss compact power combiner is proposed to reduce the overall die size and keep high PAE. The amplifier presented here has the advantage to be very compact compared to similar MMICs High Power Amplifiers (HPA). An innovative design methodology based on a strong correlation between the amplifier and the combiner design is introduced.