Broadband 8 W Ka-band MMIC Power Amplifier Using 100 nm GaN Technology

The downsizing of the gate length in Gallium Nitride (GaN) process allows to target higher frequency application and simultaneously to improve general performances of MMIC with longer gate length. In this paper, we present the first MMIC results achieved on in house GaN based technology under development with 100nm gate length. The Ka-band HPA designed using preliminary design kit elements exhibits an output power greater than 8 W over 26–35 GHz band with a minimum of Power Added Efficiency (PAE) of 26.5 % at
$V_{DD}=15$
V. The compact 11.4 mm
²
3-stage HPA has linear gain higher than 23 dB. This demonstrator achieves among the best performances in term of trade-off between output power, gain, PAE and bandwidth. Therefore, this paper is a valuable contribution to the state of the art.