A New Modeling Technique for Microwave Multicell Transistors Based on EM Simulations

Dealing with high-power operation (i.e., >100 W) is extremely critical to power-amplifier designers due to the lack of accurate transistor models of multicell (i.e., powerbar) devices. The reason is twofold: from one side, it is extremely difficult to characterize high-power transistors (e.g., device instability, thermal issues, microwave instrumentation costs, and measurement uncertainty that drastically increases with the investigated power level); and from the other side, the scaling proprieties of the model, moving from the unit-cell device to the multicell one, are inherently poor due to the different passive access structures to the active-device area. In this article, for the first time, an accurate modeling technique oriented to multicell devices is described, which allows one to extract a compact model of a multicell transistor showing similar prediction accuracy of the unit-cell one. Our assumptions have been widely demonstrated in the manuscript by a comprehensive characterization campaign from small- to large-signal operations carried out on both the unit- and multicell devices.