A Broadband 20W GaN High Power Amplifier for Ku-band satellite communication

A Ku-band high power amplifier (HPA) is designed based on the 0.15µm GaN HEMT process. To improve the power added efficiency and gain, a high gate-width drive ratio of 1:6:38.4 is selected for a three-stage topology. Multi-order Chebyshev impedance transformers are used for realizing this high impedance transformation ratio match networks. Meanwhile, a compact 8-way power combining network with low insertion loss is adopted to improve the output power and power added efficiency. The measured results under continuous wave (CW) show that the small signal gain exceeds 30 dB over 13–17 GHz, and the input return loss (IRL) is better than -11dB. The output power is between 42–44 dBm and the power-added efficiency (PAE) is more than 30%. The chip size is 2.6 mm×4.3mm.