A 24-30 GHz GaN Front-End MMIC with Coupled-Resonator based Transmit/Receive Switch for 5G Millimeter-Wave Applications

This paper presents a compact wideband front-end MMIC with an integrated transmit/receive switch based on coupled-resonator technique. The output matching network of PA is utilized to generate additional resonant pole in the RX mode and enables impedance transformation in the TX mode simultaneously. The RX branch utilizes coupled resonators to broaden gain bandwidth and achieve wideband noise matching in the RX mode. To validate the proposed architecture, a 24-30 GHz front-end MMIC is implemented using a commercial 0.15-μm GaN HEMT process. In TX mode, it achieves a gain over 17 dB, a 14.3-17 % saturated PAE and 27.8-29.3 dBm Psat. The average output power, measured with 64QAM 100MSysm/s modulated signal is 21 dBm with a PAEavg of 3.7 %. The RX branch demonstrates a gain of over 18.8 dB, a NF of less than 4.4 dB, and an OP1dB of 9.7-12.9 dBm. In addition, the chip area is 2.1mmx2.6 mm.