Design of 15W X-Band GaN Based Transmit / Receive Module for Airborne Active Phased Array Radar Applications

Transmit / Receive module (TRM) is the core component that addresses key requirements of next generation Active Electronically Scanned Array Radars i.e. multifarious functionality, modularity and scalability. Furthermore, ostensible requirements of miniaturization, wideband performance, high-output power and apt electrical performance exacerbate design intricacies of TRM. Thus, the proposed paper aims to design TRM ranging from 8.5 GHz – 11 GHz, with 15W output power while meeting half-the-wavelength size constraint. Moreover, the proposed paper focuses to devise apt architecture, opt substrate optimally, propose PCB layer and MMIC stack-up, design high-frequency transmission lines, perform crosstalk analysis and propose test-setup for validation of TRM. The proposed architecture of TRM was validated through RF budget simulation in Visual System Simulator (AWR) followed by transmission lines design in ANSYS HFSS, Multi-layer PCB design in Cadence Allegro and Crosstalk simulations in ANSYS SIwave. In a nutshell, the achieved performance of TRM was up-to-the-mark in terms of returns loss and fractional bandwidth as return losses of all high-frequency transmission lines were below -20 dB and fractional bandwidth < 40% was attained over the entire X-Band from 8 GHz to 12 GHz. Furthermore, the near-end crosstalk (NEXT) and far-end crosstalk (FEXT) were achieved to be < 7%.