Title: Development of Gallium Nitride Monolithic Microwave Circuits for the Modular Dual-Band Ku/Ka Antenna Tile with Digital Calibration (K-Tile)
Presenting Author: Andy Fung
Organization: Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Co-Author(s):
James Hoffman, Fernando Aguirre, Steve Horst, and Dimitris Anagnostou

Abstract:
This presentation will discuss the development of Ka-band gallium nitride (GaN) monolithic microwave integrated circuits (MMICs) for a low-cost, compact, modular transceiver tile unit cell (K-Tile) that can be physically reproduced and arranged in an array, and subsequently electronically synchronized using previously demonstrated digital calibration for enabling an architecture for scalable radar systems. The ultimate goal of the dual Ka/Ku-band array radar systems is to allow for agile large volume scanning for geophysical remote sensing applications, such as precipitation measurements. This talk will review GaN MMICs that are in development for the K-Tile. We will discuss the power amplifier, low noise amplifier, switches, coupler and voltage controlled attenuator that will compose the radar tile frontend. Simulations of characteristics of interest such as output power, efficiency, noise figure and/or S-parameters (gain, match and/or isolation) of the components will be presented as well as their physical layout.