A Ku band four-stage PHEMT 1W MMIC power amplifier

A successful development of a very high performance and reliable power PHEMT MMIC technology is reported. In this paper, a Ku-Band 1 W AlGaAs/InGaAs/GaAs PHEMT MMIC power amplifier for VSAT ODU application is demonstrated. This four-stage amplifier is designed to fully match for a 50 Ω input and output impedance. With 7 V and 700 mA DC bias condition, the amplifier has achieved 30 dB small-signal gain, 30.8 dBm 1-dB gain compression power with 24.5% power-added efficiency (PAE) and 31.3 dBm saturation power with 27.5% PAE from 14 to 17 GHz.