Design, fabrication and characterising of 100 W GaN HEMT for Ku-band application

Abstract

Ku-band GaN power transistor with output power over 100 W under the pulsed operation mode is presented. A high temperature A1N nucleation together with an Fe doped GaN buffer was introduced for the developed GaN HEMT. The AlGaN/GaN hetero-structure deposited on 3 inch SiC substrate exhibited a 2DEG hall mobility and density of ∼2100 cm2/(V·s) and 1.0 × 1013 cm−2, respectively, at room temperature. Dual field plates were introduced to the designed 0.25 μm GaN HEMT and the source connected field plate was optimized for minimizing the peak field plate near the drain side of the gate, while maintaining excellent power gain performance for Ku-band application. The load-pull measurement at 14 GHz showed a power density of 5.2 W/mm for the fabricated 400 μm gate periphery GaN HEMT operated at a drain bias of 28 V. A Ku-band internally matched GaN power transistor was developed with two 10.8 mm gate periphery GaN HEMT chips combined. The GaN power transistor exhibited an output power of 102 W at 13.3 GHz and 32 V operating voltage under pulsed operation mode with a pulse width of 100 μs and duty cycle of 10%. The associated power gain and power added efficiency were 9.2 dB and 48%, respectively. To the best of the authors' knowledge, the PAE is the highest for Ku-band GaN power transistor with over 100 W output power.