Research on Broadband Millimeter-wave Cascode Amplifier using MHEMT

In this paper, millimeter-wave broadband MHEMT (Metamorphic High Electron Mobility Transistor) cascode amplifiers were designed and fabricated. The InGaAs/InAlAs/GaAs MHEMT was fabricated for cascode amplifiers. The DC characteristics of MHEMT are 670 mA/mm of drain current density, 588 mS/mm of maximum transconductance. The current gain cut-off frequency() is 139 GHz and the maximum oscillation frequency() is 266 GHz. To prevent oscillation of the designed cascode amplifiers, a parallel resistor and capacitor were connected to the drain of common gate device. By using the CPW (Coplanar Waveguide) transmission line, the cascode amplifier was designed and matched for the broadband characteristics. The designed amplifier was fabricated by the MHEMT MMIC process that was developed through this research. As the results of measurement, the amplifier was obtained 3 dB bandwidth of 50.37 GHz between 20.76 to 71.13 GHz. Also, this amplifier represents the S21 gain with the average 7.07 dB gain in bandwidth and the maximum gain of 10.3 dB at 30 GHz.