Telecommunications, security, industrial, medical, radar, military communications and electronics of all kind are among the many services that utilize RF power amplifiers in their transmitter circuits. Solid-state PA technology and PA concepts have been commercially on the move since the early nineties to provide cost and energy efficient high-performance solutions for an increasing number of applications.
Various specialized technologies like GaAs, bipolar and LDMOS are being and continue to be deployed for the different systems. However new GaN and SiGe-bipolar technologies are now available in high performance and quality and are enabling significant further improvements in power, efficiency, integration and high-frequency behavior.
In this seminar criteria and trade-off’s for the technology selection and the key properties of the GaN technology will be discussed. In addition to the electrical components performance, major criteria will be addressed such as high reliability, long lifetime and high yield fabrication. Finally GaN and LDMOS product portfolios and a SiGe-BiCMOS transceiver based reference design for mm-Wave communications will be presented.
