A production technology for GaAs MMIC's has been developed. In a six-month period, seventy 2-in wafers have been processed for X-band monolithic power and low-noise amplifiers and more than 2000 working chips have been produced. The two-stage power amplifiers have achieved a typical performance of 1.6-w output power with 8-dB associated gain and 20-percent power-added efficiency at 9.5 GHz. The two-stage low-noise amplifiers have consistently achieved 3-dB noise figure with 20-dB associated gain at the same frequency. Improvement of MMIC processing technology implemented in this work has resulted in an average dc chip yield of 15 percent.

Production Technology for High-Yield, High-Performance GaAs Monolithic Amplifiers

A production technology for GaAs MMIC's has been developed. In a six-month period, seventy 2-in wafers have been processed for X -band monolithic power and low-noise amplifiers and more than 2000 working chips have been produced. The two-stage power amplifiers have achieved a typical performance of 1.6-w output power with 8-dB associated gain and 20-percent power-added efficiency at 9.5 GHz. The two-stage low-noise amplifiers have consistently achieved 3-dB noise figure with 20-dB associated gain at the same frequency. Improvement of MMIC processing technology implemented in this work has resulted in-an average de chip yield of 15 percent.

Production technology for high-yield, high-performance GaAs monolithic amplifiers

A production technology for high yield and high performance MMIC's has been developed. Two stage X-band power amplifier and low noise amplifiers were used as test vehicles in this producibility study. The power amplifier chips have consistently demonstrated a 1.5 watt output power with 9 dB gain and 20% power added efficiency. The low noise amplifier chips have achieved a reproducible performance of less than 3 dB noise figure with 20 dB gain. Producibility improvement of MMIC chip fabrication has achieved an average yield well in excess of 10%.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/8178/24537/01113636.pdf

Production Technology Development for High Yield, High Performance X-Band Monolithic Power and Low Noise Amplifiers

Advances in material technology and wafer processing in the past years have made GaAs monolithic microwave integrated circuits practical. Obvious applications for this technology include systems for satellite communication and phased array radars. State-of-the-art performance of GaAs FETs and their application in hybrid microwave integrated circuit will be introduced. The recently developed microwave communication MMICs which were based on the successful development of the FETs and the hybrid circuits will also be presented.

GaAs Integrated Circuits for Microwave Communications

A wideband monolithic low noise amplifier which covers the frequency band from 8 to 18 GHz has been designed and fabricated. The amplifier has a noise figure less than 4.3 dB and an associated gain of 8.5 dB across the entire band. A revised version of the amplifier which has a design goal of sub-four dB noise figure and an associated gain of 12 dB has been processed. Measured data will be presented at the conference.

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/8178/24536/01113601.pdf

D.W. Maki

Papers

An 8-18 GHz Monolithic Two-Stage Low Noise Amplifier