A 28W 32-38Ghz GaN MMIC Power Amplifier Using Second-harmonic Matching Technique

A 28 W 32-38 GHz monolithic microwave integrated circuit (MMIC) power amplifier (PA) using second-harmonic matching technique is presented in this letter. The proposed PA adopts a passive second-harmonic matching network (SHMN) to realize broadband second-harmonic source matching for improving the efficiency of the Ka-band PAs. It consists of four same single-ended power amplifiers (SPAs). The measured result scores the peak power added efficiency (PAE) of 30% at 38 GHz and the saturated output power more than 44.5 dBm from 32 to 38 GHz (a fractional bandwidth of 17.1%) in continuous wave mode.