Harmonic Suppression of a Three-Stage 25-31-GHz GaN MMIC Power Amplifier Using Elliptic Low-Pass Filtering Matching Network

• Published in: IEEE microwave and wireless components letters Vol. 32; no. 6; pp. 551 - 554
• Main Authors: Chen, Peng, Zhu, Xiao-Wei, Liu, Rui-Jia, Zhao, Ziming, Zhang, Lei, Yu, Chao, Hong, Wei
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.06.2022
• Subjects: Broadband; Chebyshev approximation; Gain; Gallium nitride; gallium nitride (GaN); Harmonic analysis; Harmonics suppression; Manganese; microwave monolithic integrated circuit (MMIC); modified elliptic low-pass filter (LPF); power amplifier (PA); Power generation
• ISSN: 1531-1309; 1558-1764
• DOI: 10.1109/LMWC.2022.3148793

In this letter, the modified elliptic low-pass filtering (LPF) matching network (MN) is proposed for harmonic suppression of a wideband gallium nitride (GaN) microwave monolithic integrated circuit (MMIC) power amplifier (PA) at millimeter-wave (mm-wave). To investigate the effectiveness of the method at mm-wave, a three-stage 25-31-GHz GaN MMIC PA is designed using a commercial 150-nm GaN HEMT foundry process, with a mask area of <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">4.5\times2.6 </tex-math></inline-formula> mm 2 . Simulated results show that the second harmonic of the PA can be effectively suppressed by using the elliptic LPF MN. Experimental results show that the realized MMIC PA achieves a saturated power-added efficiency (PAE) higher than 26.1% from 25 to 31 GHz, with a peak PAE of 31.5% at 29 GHz. The saturated gain and output power are more than 20 and 34 dBm within the band, respectively.