A Novel Independently Biased 3-Stack GaN HEMT Configuration for Efficient Design of Microwave Amplifiers

Abstract

The power amplifier (PA) and low-noise amplifier (LNA) are the most critical components of transceiver systems including radar, mobile communications, satellite communications, etc. While the PA is the key component of the transmitter (TX), the LNA is the key component of the receiver (RX) of the transceiver system. It is pointed out that traditional design approaches for both the LNA and PA face challenging drawbacks. When designing an LNA, the power gain and noise figure of the LNA are difficult to improve simultaneously. For PA design, it indicates that efficiency and linearity of the PA are also hard to improve simultaneously. This study aims to surmount this by proposing a novel independently biased 3-stack GaN high-electron-mobility transistor (HEMT) configuration for efficient design of both PA and LNA for next generation wireless communication systems. By employing an independently biased technique, the proposed configuration can offer superior performance at both small-signal (SS) for LNA design and large-signal (LS) for PA design compared with other typical circuit configurations. Simulation results show that by utilizing an adaptive bias control of each transistor of the proposed configuration, both power gain and noise figure can be improved simultaneously for the LNA design. Moreover, efficiency and linearity can be also improved at the same time for the PA design. Compared results with other typical configurations including a single-stage, conventional cascode, independently biased cascode, and conventional 3-stack reveals that the proposed configuration exhibits superior advantages at both SS and LS operation.