260 GHz Broadband Power Amplifier MMIC

This paper presents a broadband H-Band (220-325 GHz) power amplifier in a 35nm InGaAs-based metamorphic high electron mobility transistor technology. The amplifier is realized as a submillimeter-wave monolithic integrated circuit and is designed to drive a high power amplifier in a multi-gigabit communication system or to be implemented in a wideband millimeter-wave radar to detect imperfections in materials. A five-stage amplifier S-MMIC based on common-source gain cells was realized and measured on-wafer with a maximum gain of 14.7dB at 245 GHz. The 3-dB-bandwidth is from 238 to 292 GHz with a gain variation of around 2dB. The amplifier has four parallel transistors in the last two stages and provides up to 4 dBm of output power, under 1dB gain compression. A saturated output power of 6.7 dBm at 280GHz could be measured.