Innovative Approaches to Increased Power and Efficiency in Components for X-Band Radar for Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD)

The state of Transmit/Receive (T/R) Module technology for airborne radars is falling short of meeting current and future requirements. Current Prime Contractors have little incentive to reduce cost or improve performance. Twenty year old technology kludged together to provide low output power with such low efficiency that the equipment used to cool the modules is comparable in size and cost to the radar itself. Most of the cost is wrapped up in the thermal management due to the inferior design of both the High Power Amplifier (HPA) as well as the surrounding packaging. MMICMAN proposes to improve power amplifier performance at the die level to achieve 30W at X-band with >45% Power Added Efficiency. This performance will be obtained utilizing MMICMAN proprietary efficiency enhancement techniques enabled by High Voltage Gallium Arsenide (HVGaAs) technology. The HVGaAs process is an Office of Naval Research funded technology available exclusively to MMICMAN via business arrangement with Triquint Semiconductor. For the purposes of Phase I of this proposal, the NON-CLASSIFIED HV2 process will be used. The HV3GaAs technology is Classified SECRET, and MMICMAN personnel have security clearances in place and a secure facility to utilize HV3GaAs technology in Phase II. Efficiency Improvements combined with the MMICMAN BGA-HPATM technology will enable MMICMAN to realize this amplifier module for insertion into current and next-generation phased array radar systems.