A Q-band high gain and low noise Variable Gain Amplifier (VGA) module using dual gate AlGaAs/InGaAs pseudomorphic HEMTs has been developed. The dual gate HEMT can be fabricated by the same process of the single gate HEMT which has the gate length of 0.15 µm. The Q-band VGA module consists of a 1-stage low noise amplifier (LNA) MMIC using a single gate HEMT and a 2-stage VGA MMIC using dual gate HEMTs. During the design, an accurate noise modeling is introduced to achieve low noise performance. A fully passivated film is employed to achieve reliability. The VGA module has a gain of more than 20 dB from 41 GHz to 52 GHz and a maximum gain of 24.5 dB at 50 GHz. A gain control range of more than 30 dB is achieved in the same frequency range. A phase deviation is less than 10 degrees in 10 dB gain control range. A minimum noise figure of 1.8 dB with an associated gain of 22 dB is achieved at 43 GHz and the noise figure is less than 2.5 dB with associated gain of more than 20 dB from 41 GHz to 46 GHz when biased for low noise figure. This performance is comparable with the best data ever reported for LNAs at Q-band including both GaAs based HEMTs and InP based HEMTs.

An ultra low noise 50-GHz-Band amplifier (LNA) MMIC has been developed using an AlGaAs/InGaAs pseudomorphic HEMT. A noise figure of 1.8 dB with an associated gain of 8.1 dB is achieved at 50 GHz. The noise figure is less than 2.0 dB from 50 GHz to 52.5 GHz. This is the state-of-the-art noise figure for low noise amplifiers around 50 GHz. The success of this LNA development came from the excellent HEMT and MMIC technologies and the accurate modeling of active and passive elements. Good agreement between measured and simulated data over the band from 40 GHz to 60 GHz is obtained.

Millimeter-wave monolithic low noise amplifier modules using 0.15 µm AlGaAs/InGaAs/GaAs pseudomorphic HEMTs have been developed at V- and W-bands for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer. To achieve low noise and high gain of V-band single-stage and W-band two-stage monolithic amplifiers, a reactive matching method is employed in the design of input noise matching and output gain matching circuits based on the results of on-carrier S-parameter measurements up to 50 GHz and noise parameter measurements at 60 and 90 GHz. A V-band four-stage monolithic amplifier module has been mounted on a hermetically-sealed package with microstrip interface and has achieved a noise figure of 3 dB with a gain of 42.2 dB at 51 GHz. A W-band six-stage amplifier module has been mounted on a hermetically-sealed package with waveguide interface and has achieved a noise figure of 4.3 dB with a gain of 28.1 dB at 91 GHz. These results represent the best noise figure performance ever achieved by multi-stage monolithic low-noise amplifier modules.

A 100 W, low distortion AlGaAs/GaAs heterostructure FET has been developed for CDMA cellular base stations. This FET employs the longest gate finger ever reported of 800 µm to shrink the chip size. The size of the chip and the package are miniaturized to 1.242.6 mm2 and 17.4 24.0 mm2, respectively. The developed FET exhibits 100 W (50 dBm) saturation output power, and 11.5 dB power gain at 1 dB gain compression at 2.1 GHz. The third-order intermodulation distortion and the power-added efficiency under the two-tone test condition (Δf=1 MHz) are -35 dBc and 24%, respectively at 42 dBm output power, that is 8 dB back off from the saturation power.

A 0.15 µm T-shaped gate AlInAs/InGaAs high electron mobility transistor (HEMT) with an excellent RF performance has been developed using selective wet gate recess etching. The gate recess is formed by a pH-adjusted citric acid/NH4OH/H2O2 mixture with an etching selectivity of more than 30 for InGaAs over AlInAs. The standard deviation of saturation drain current (Idss) is as small as 3.2 mA for an average Idss of 47 mA on a 3 inch diameter InP wafer. The etching time for recess formation is optimized and an ft of 130 GHz and an MSG of 10 dB at 60 GHz are obtained. The extremely low minimum noise figure (Fmin) of 0.9 dB with an associated gain (Ga) of 7.0 dB has been achieved at 60 GHz for a SiON-passivated device. This noise performance is comparable to the lowest value of Fmin ever reported for an AlInAs/InGaAs HEMT with a passivation film.