A Review of GaN MMIC Power Amplifier Technologies for Millimeter-Wave Applications

Keigo NAKATANI
Yutaro YAMAGUCHI
Takuma TORII
Masaomi TSURU

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Electronics   Vol.E105-C    No.10    pp.433-440
Publication Date: 2022/10/01
Publicized: 2022/07/13
Online ISSN: 1745-1353
DOI: 10.1587/transele.2022MMI0006
Type of Manuscript: Special Section INVITED PAPER (Special Section on Microwave and Millimeter-Wave Technologies)
Category: 
Keyword: 
GaN,  SATCOM,  5G,  high power amplifier,  MMIC,  Doherty amplifier,  millimeter wave,  

Full Text: FreePDF(5.6MB)
Summary: 
GaN microwave monolithic integrated circuit (MMIC) power amplifiers (PAs) technologies for millimeter-wave (mm-wave) applications are reviewed in this paper. In the mm-wave band, GaN PAs have achieved high-output power as much as traveling wave tube amplifiers used in satellite communications. Additionally, GaN PAs have been integrated enough to be used for 5G and Beyond-5G. In this paper, a high accuracy large-signal GaN-HEMT modeling technique including the trapping effects is introduced in mm-waves. The prototyped PAs designed with the novel modeling technique have achieved RF performance comparable to that of the state-of-the-art GaN PAs in mm-wave.