A High-Efficiency 21W GaN Power Amplifier MMIC for K-Band Satellite Communications

A high efficiency 17.5-20.5 GHz high-power amplifier (HPA) microwave integrated circuit (MMIC) is designed with an advanced 0.15 pm Gallium Nitride (GaN) HEMT technology on silicon carbide (SiC) substrate. Low loss and wideband output matching networks are applied to improve efficiency and power. With chip dimensions of 3.6x4.0 mm(2), the power amplifier achieves 43.2dBm (21W) saturated output power with 43% power-added efficiency (PAE), and 21dB power gain is obtained over the frequency band. It is worth mentioning that the PAE is higher than 41% from 18-20.5GHz.