GaN MMIC Ka-Band Power Amplifier

The improvements and innovations achieved during the Phase I portion of this 10-20 W, KA-Band GaN MMIC PA and subsequently manufactured in a follow-on Phase II will allow us to develop other state-of-the-art, linear, high efficiency PAs for NASA at other frequency bands. Specifically, Custom MMIC can apply these Phase I results to improve the 5 W, 25 to 27 GHz Power Amplifier as previously developed for NASA Goddard, and the 5 W, 35 GHz Power Amplifier for Radar Applications as previously developed for NASA JPL, such that both amplifiers can be increased to greater than 10 W output power with better PAE. Other NASA Applications could be 1) NASA deep space missions that require high data rate Ka-Band downlinks, 2) Mass, power and volume challenged surface missions to moons, asteroids and comets (such as Europa Lander), and 3) Future NASA instruments that require Ka-Band radars (such as Mars 2020).

Linear GaN PA MMICs represent a new frontier in microwave research and development, though to date few manufacturers have been able to turn such efforts into viable commercial products. Custom MMIC is one such company that has made the successful transition from design to production on a number of GaN amplifiers, and so is well suited to bring an expanded portfolio of new GaN amplifiers to the market in a timely and efficient manner. Custom MMIC will use the follow-on Phase II SBIR contract to bring a number of new 10-20 W, Ka-band high power amplifiers to the commercial space. The 25-27 GHz GaN 5 W linear amplifier is being well received in the commercial markets. A customer has already designed it into a new product and we are transitioning to production. We are in discussions with this customer as to whether the performance can be improved. It is likely that when this SBIR program transitions to Phase II we would also target this lower frequency band for a 10 W linear variant. More »