A CW 7-12 GHz GaN Hybrid Power Amplifier IC with High PAE Using the Load-Impedance Change Compensation Technique

In this paper, we demonstrated a broadband GaN power amplifier hybrid IC with high power added efficiency (PAE) under CW operation using load-impedance change compensation technique. The external output matching circuit is composed of a transmission line, an open stub and a short stub with chip capacitors to realize both wide bandwidth and high voltage operation. As a result, we developed 7-12 GHz broadband medium power amplifier and demonstrated a CW output power of 6.5 W with the PAE of 40% using 0.5-mum GaN-HEMT technology at 7 GHz. The output power also exceeded 4.9 W with PAE of over 31% up to 11 GHz. At 12 GHz, the output power was 4.1 W with PAE of 26%.