A 8–12 GHz power amplifier with high out-of-band rejection

Abstract

This paper proposes an 8–12 GHz monolithic power amplifier (PA) with high out-of-band rejection. This PA adopts an impedance conversion technique to reduce the Q of the output impedance of the amplifiers for all stages, which is used to achieve broadband matching performance. In addition, the bandpass matching structures and a trap circuit are adopted to effectively suppress out-of-band signals. The proposed PA is fabricated by using a 0.5 μm GaAs pHEMT process. The measurement results show that the PA has an in-band small signal gain of 23 dB ± 0.7 dB, input and output return loss are both better than −14dB, the saturation output power is about 23dBm, the power-added efficiency (PAE) is better than 20 %, and rejection ratios are 65dBc and 51dBc at 3 GHz and 17 GHz respectively. The area is of 2.3mm × 1.1 mm.