High Linearity and High Gain Performance of N-Polar GaN MIS-HEMT at 30 GHz

Though GaN HEMTs have primarily been used for power amplification, they are also well suited for receiver applications. In the front-end of receivers, non-linearities, in particular third-order intermodulation products lead to in-band signal distortion. The intermodulation distortion is primarily dominated by transconductance and its derivatives. In this paper, we report on N-polar GaN MIS-HEMTs able to simultaneously achieve high gain (12.7 dB) and excellent linearity performance (OIP3/P
_DC
of 15 dB) for low-power receiver application at 30 GHz. With a two-tone load-pull input-bias sweep, we demonstrate that the linearity of high performance HEMTs is sensitive to bias, and we present our measurement methodology to accommodate this.