Technical Contact: Dave Chow, 310-317-5330

HRL Offers GaN MIC and MMIC Prototyping Service

LOS ANGELES, June 10, 2005HRL Laboratories, LLC in Malibu, CA is now offering gallium nitride (GaN) microwave integrated circuit (MIC) and monolithic millimeter-wave integrated circuit (MMIC) prototyping service to selected customers. HRL will provide design, fabrication, and test services for MIC and MMIC devices and modules from UHF to Q-band.  HRL has also developed a MMIC design kit and will provide fabrication services for custom designs.

GaN HFETs offer higher output power densities, higher breakdown voltage, and better survivability than gallium arsenide (GaAs) transistors at microwave and millimeter-wave frequencies, motivating development of MMICs for applications requiring high power density, high linearity, and robust operation. 

HRL has demonstrated and reported excellent performance of GaN MIC and MMIC circuits including a 20-W X-band MIC power module, a wideband MMIC LNA, and a Ka-band power MMIC. The 20-W X-band MIC power module combined four 1-mm-wide discrete GaN HFETs and achieved power added efficiency of 43 percent and 7 dB associated

gain. The 33-GHz (Ka-band) power amplifier MMIC, designed and fabricated at HRL, demonstrated output power levels up to 2.8 W with power added efficiency of 27 percent. The wideband (3-18 GHz) MMIC LNA demonstrated greater than 20 dB gain over the band and a minimum noise figure of 2.4 dB.

HRL's GaN MMICs are routinely fabricated on 3-inch-diameter wafers; a 100-mm-substrate process has recently been developed at HRL enabling a 70 percent increase in fabricated devices per wafer. HRL has already successfully demonstrated GaN HFET devices on 100-mm substrates, and is positioned to meet increased market demand as insertion opportunities for GaN components grow.

HRL Laboratories, LLC develops and produces GaN/AlGaN HFET integrated circuits for RF applications as power amplifiers and low noise amplifiers for its LLC Member Companies (Boeing, General Motors, and Raytheon), for the US Government, and for other commercial entities.

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