On stand 113 at European Microwave Week (EuMW 2017) in Nuremberg, Germany (8-13 October), monolithic microwave integrated circuit developer Custom MMIC of Westford, MA, USA is discussing its latest developments in RF and microwave gallium arsenide (GaAs) and gallium nitride (GaN) MMICs, including ultra-wideband amplifiers, linear mixers, low-noise amplifiers (LNAs), low-phase-noise amplifiers (LPNAs), and switches.
On 11 October at 2:10pm in the Kiew room – as part of the 47th European Microwave Conference’s EuMC28 sessions on amplifiers and receivers – lead engineer Nicholas Novaris is presenting a paper ‘Understanding the Phenomenon of High Power Pulse Recovery in GaN LNAs’, which explores and details the high-power pulse recovery behavior of commercially available and overdriven GaN LNAs. This topic has become pertinent as GaN LNAs, with comparable noise figures to commonly installed GaAs LNAs, are capable of withstanding much higher input power levels than GaAs, and have the added benfit of not requiring additional and performance-degrading limiter circuitry, says Custom MMIC.
This input power-handling capability is attractive for defense applications, as military and aerospace receivers are often subject to jamming signals and may be in close proximity to high-power transmitters, says the firm. However, it has been discovered that, even though GaN LNAs can withstand these high-power interfering signals, when the interference signal is quickly removed residual distortion occurs until the LNA recovers. So, advancing on past research, Custom MMIC engineers subjected GaN LNAs to a series of non-coherent jamming signals with varying duration and intensity. It was discovered that the recovery time exhibited a radical relationship to the input power. Moreover, the input action also significantly impacted the recovery time.
