A GaN HEMT Amplifier Design for Phased Array Radars and 5G New Radios.

Dawid Kuchta,Wojciech Wojtasiak,Daniel Gryglewski

doi:10.3390/mi11040398

Dawid Kuchta, Wojciech Wojtasiak + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/mi11040398

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Journal: Micromachines	Publication Date: Apr 10, 2020
Citations: 14	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: Warsaw University of Technology

Abstract

Power amplifiers applied in modern active electronically scanned array (AESA) radars and 5G radios should have similar features, especially in terms of phase distortion, which dramatically affects the spectral regrowth and, moreover, they are difficult to be compensated by predistortion algorithms. This paper presents a GaN-based power amplifier design with a reduced level of transmittance distortions, varying in time, without significantly worsening other key features such as output power, efficiency and gain. The test amplifier with GaN-on-Si high electron mobility transistors (HEMT) NPT2018 from MACOM provides more than 17 W of output power at the 62% PAE over a 1.0 GHz to 1.1 GHz frequency range. By applying a proposed design approach, it was possible to decrease phase changes on test pulses from 0.5° to 0.2° and amplitude variation from 0.8 dB to 0.2 dB during the pulse width of 40 µs and 40% duty cycle.

Highlights

Radar systems, mainly 3D Active Electronically Scanned Array (AESA), strongly supported by the latest achievements in information technology, bring new challenges to the designers of transmit/receive (T/R) modules, especially High-Power Amplifiers (HPAs) based on solid-state devices [1,2]
The requirements concerning linearity and efficiency of HPAs are confronted with the needs of both systems for higher output power and improved the efficiency of heat management
The same is true for the 5G and Long-Term Evolution Advanced (LTE-A) network systems which are using quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) of higher orders and orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) methods [11,12,13]

Summary

Introduction

Mainly 3D Active Electronically Scanned Array (AESA), strongly supported by the latest achievements in information technology, bring new challenges to the designers of transmit/receive (T/R) modules, especially High-Power Amplifiers (HPAs) based on solid-state devices [1,2]. The same is true for the 5G and Long-Term Evolution Advanced (LTE-A) network systems which are using quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) of higher orders and orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) methods [11,12,13]. Both QAM and OFDM are sensitive to transmittance changes generated mainly by output stages of base station transmitter power amplifiers [8,9,10,11,12,13].

Power Amplifier Analysis

Findings

Conclusions