High Efficiency, Low Power, Low Noise Amplifiers for SATCOM

This proposal drastically reduces the existing power dissipation of low noise amplifiers within phase array systems. We intend to use an innovative and novel modification to a standard topology to achieve excellent performance with small size and mismatch tolerance. Such a novel use of current sharing in a balanced amplifier topology, along with a metamorphic HEMT (mHEMT) technology will result in the smallest and best performance for this design. The mHEMT will create a situation where the smallest design can be achieved by reducing the number of stages of amplification necessary to achieve greater than 20dB of gain while maintaining a good noise figure match. Further reduction in size for the amplifiers is proposed with the use of lumped element hybrids in the place of distributed elements.