Articles
DC To 85 GHz TWA And Ka-band 4.9W Power Amplifier Using An Optical Lithography Based, Low-Cost PHEMT Process
January 25, 2010
•White Paper: DC To 85 GHz TWA And Ka-band 4.9W Power Amplifier Using An Optical Lithography Based, Low-Cost PHEMT Process
By Kohei Fujii, John Stanback, and Henrik Morkner, Avago Technologies
Introduction
Low-cost, high performance mm-wave MMICs are crucial to the development of mm-wave radio links, automotive radars, and test equipments, as the market for these applications mature. For mm-wave MMIC device production with gate length of 0.15µm or shorter, the industry standard technology is direct-write electron-beam lithography. However, the direct e-beam process has a technical bottleneck to reduce wafer cost due to the slow wafer processing time. To solve this problem, Avago developed a 248 nm deep-UV optical stepper based, high throughput 6" 0.15µm pHEMT process. Except for the gate processing, this process is similar to Avago's 6", 0.5µm gate pHEMT process that has shipped 6000-wafers/year primarily for cell phone and wireless LAN applications. The goal is to reduce the mm-wave MMIC wafer cost for emerging consumer mm-wave applications.
In this article, Avago's newly developed 0.15µm low cost 6" GaAs MMIC production process will be described. To evaluate the process capability for mm-wave applications, a DC to 85GHz traveling amplifier (TWA), and a 28-30.5GHz 4.9W power amplifier (PA) were designed, fabricated, and tested. The TWA shows 8dB of minimum gain and 14dBm output power up to 85GHz frequency range. 4.9W PA shows 20dB of small-signal gain and 36.9dBm of output power in between 29GHz and 30.5GHz frequencies.
Click Here To Download:•White Paper: DC To 85 GHz TWA And Ka-band 4.9W Power Amplifier Using An Optical Lithography Based, Low-Cost PHEMT Process
