A GaN Single-Chip Front-End for Active Electronically Scanned Arrays

A Single-Chip Front-End design exploiting a 250-nm gate length GaN process provided by United Monolithic Semiconductor (UMS) is proposed in this contribution. The design procedure and preliminary measurement results are provided. In Rx mode, a noise figure lower than 1.75 dB and a gain better than 30 dB, with a ripple lower than 0.5 dB, have been achieved. In Tx mode, a 45 dBm output power and 40% PAE have been achieved at the nominal operating point (11 dBm input power). The reported performance spans a 13% bandwidth in the S-band and the MMIC is targeted for Active Electronically Scanned Antenna applications. The whole chip occupies an area of 7×7 mm².