HIGH LINEARITY, HIGH-POWER, QUADRATURE BALANCED AMPLIFIERS FOR ACTIVE TRANSMIT ARRAYS

VT Silicon, Inc. has proposed a Silicon (Si) IC based solution integrated into a multi-chip module developed by Lockheed Martin (LM) NE&SS. We have shown a 12dB OIP3 improvement with the quadrature balanced amplifier topology. We will utilize commercial Silicon Germanium (SiGe) heterojunction bipolar transistor (HBT) BiCMOS processes to directly enable a path for commercialization of this power amplifier technology. With the use of multiple thousands of elements (each containing a power amplifier module) per aperture face per ship, Si technology provides sizeable reductions in cost. In addition, the use of SiGe heterojunction bipolar devices on high resistivity Si substrates can provide power densities on the order of 0.5 mW/um2 up to 18 GHz, allowing for competitive die sizes with GaAs for power amplifier applications.