High Linearity and High Gain Performance of N-Polar GaN MIS-HEMT at 30 GHz
Pawana Shrestha, Matthew Guidry, Brian Romanczyk, Nirupam Hatui, Christian Wurm, Athith Krishna, Shubhra S. Pasayat, Rohit R. Karnaty, S. Keller, James F. Buckwalter, Umesh K. Mishra
Abstract
Though GaN HEMTs have primarily been used for power amplification, they are also well suited for receiver applications. In the front-end of receivers, non-linearities, in particular third-order intermodulation products lead to in-band signal distortion. The intermodulation distortion is primarily dominated by transconductance and its derivatives. In this paper, we report on N-polar GaN MIS-HEMTs able to simultaneously achieve high gain (12.7 dB) and excellent linearity performance (OIP3/P <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">DC</sub> of 15 dB) for low-power receiver application at 30 GHz. With a two-tone load-pull input-bias sweep, we demonstrate that the linearity of high performance HEMTs is sensitive to bias, and we present our measurement methodology to accommodate this.