A four-stage Ku-band 1 watt PHEMT MMIC power amplifier

In this paper, a Ku-band 1 watt AlGaAs/InGaAs/GaAs PHEMT MMIC power amplifier for VSAT ODU (outdoor unit) applications is demonstrated. This four-stage amplifier is designed to fully match for a 50 ohm input and output impedance. With 7 V and 700 mA DC bias condition, the amplifier has achieved 30 dB small-signal gain, 30.8 dBm 1-dB gain compression power with 24.5% power-added efficiency (PAE) and 31.3 dBm saturation power with 27.5% PAE from 14 to 17 GHz.