A C-band Drive Amplifier in a 0.5um GaAs Process

This paper presents a three-stage negative feedback drive amplifier (DA) which works in C-band (4-8 GHz). The first two stages of the DA mainly use RLC negative feedback structure between the gate and drain to broaden the bandwidth. The third stage adopts reactance matching network to improve output power and achieve high power gain. This DA is fabricated in a 0. 5um GaAs pHEMT process, and the test results show that the small signal gain is of 25dB over the whole C-band, the IP 1dB is of - 5dbm, and the OP 1dB is of 18dbm, the input reflect loss is less than -11dB, the output reflect loss is less than - 16dB, and the PAE is of 24%. The chip area of DA is 2.0mm * 1.0mm. The proposed DA in this paper could be applied to the front end of radar T/R module.