A Scalable Large-Signal Multiharmonic Model of AlGaN/GaN HEMTs and Its Application in C-Band High Power Amplifier MMIC

Abstract

A scalable electrothermal large-signal AlGaN/GaN HEMTs model for both fundamental and multiharmonics is presented based on the modified Angelov model. To obtain accurate scalability of the electrothermal model, a simple empirical expression is proposed for the geometric and power-dissipation-dependent nonlinear thermal resistance $R_{{\mathrm {th}}}$ . Only one additional parameter with linear scaling rule is needed in the drain-source current ( $I_{{\mathrm {ds}}}$ ) model for a scalable large-signal multiharmonic model. The proposed model has been validated by different AlGaN/GaN HEMTs characterized by on-wafer measurements. It shows that the presented scalable model can well predict the dc $I$ – $V$ , pulsed $I$ – $V$ , scattering (S) parameters, and large-signal performance up to third harmonic. Furthermore, to further validation, a C-band power amplifier is designed. The amplifier is realized using the second-harmonic tuned approach to enhance the efficiency. Measurement results show that the GaN high power amplifier (HPA) microwave monolithic integrated circuit (MMIC) exhibits more than 40% power-added efficiency and 60-W output power ( $P_{{\mathrm {out}}}$ ) with associated gain of 25 dB in 5–6 GHz measured at 28-V drain voltage and pulse signal with 100- $\mu \text{s}$ pulsewidth and 10% duty cycle. The area of the chip is 3.2 mm $\times5.3$ mm (16.96 mm2). These results show that the proposed model will be useful for high-efficiency HPA MMIC design.