A 15-50 GHz-Band GaAs MMIC Variable Attenuator with 20-dB Attenuation Control

Kazuya NISHIHORI  Shigeru WATANABE  Fumio SASAKI  Kazuhiro ARAI  

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Electronics   Vol.E84-C   No.10   pp.1543-1547
Publication Date: 2001/10/01
Online ISSN: 
DOI: 
Print ISSN: 0916-8516
Type of Manuscript: Special Section PAPER (Special Issue on Millimeter-Wave Circuits and Fabrication Technologies Opening up the 21st Century)
Category: 
Keyword: 
microwave and millimeter-wave,  variable attenuator,  GaAs MMIC,  HEMT,  balanced distributed configuration,  

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Summary: 
A 15-50 GHz-band GaAs MMIC variable attenuator has been developed for microwave and millimeter-wave wireless communications systems. The attenuator employs a balanced distributed configuration using shunt connected HEMT's in order to realize a broadband operation, a low insertion loss and a good impedance matching with simple control bias scheme. The MMIC was fabricated with a pseudomorphic HEMT device technology. It has exhibited an insertion loss as low as 1.6 dB with an attenuation control range as wide as 21 dB at 26 GHz. It has also shown a good linearity of an input power of more than 12 dBm at 1-dB compression point and that of 26.3 dBm at a 3rd-order intercept point.