Publisher： Cambridge University Press
E-ISSN： 1759-0795|5|3|261-269
ISSN： 1759-0787
Source： International Journal of Microwave and Wireless Technologies, Vol.5, Iss.3, 2013-06, pp. : 261-269
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Abstract
This paper reports on the design of a new power cell dedicated to Ku-band power amplifier (PA) applications. This cell called “integrated cascode” has been designed in order to propose a strong decrease in terms of circuit size for PA. The technology used relies on 0.25-μm GaAs pseudomorphic high electron mobility transistors (PHEMT) of United Monolithic Semiconductors (UMS) foundry. A distributed approach is proposed in order to model this power cell. The challenge consists of obtaining, with a better shape factor (ratio between the vertical and horizontal sizes of the transistor), the same performances than a single transistor with the same gate width. In order to design a 2W amplifier, we have used two 12 × 100 μm transistors. Cascode vertical size is 413 μm whereas a transistor with the same gate width exhibits a vertical size of 790 μm. Therefore, the shape factor is nearly one as compared to a shape factor of 4 for a classical parallel architecture. This new device allows us to decrease the Monolithic microwave integrated circuit amplifier area of 40% compared to amplifier based on single transistors.
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