Plastic Digital Array Beamformer Development With Integrated High Efficiency Gallium-Nitride MMICs

摘要

With the advent of highly efficient wide bandgap amplifiers, there is the possibility of generating high power outputs without using expensive packaging. The goal is to create a plastic panel of integrated radiators which have limited cooling while having an output with a minimum of 25 Watts per element with efficiencies above 60% at die level. Towards this end, the development of highly efficient GaN MMICs and plastic packaging is being investigated. To create the MMIC amenable for integration with a patch antenna on the backside of the PCB material, the packaging challenge is to have the high power signal flow down through the board while the heat flows in the opposite direction, up through a heat sink. In this paper, we report the performance of plastic packaged amplifiers and discuss their integration into a 16-element digital array radar.