W- And G-Band GaN Voltage-Controlled Oscillators with High Output Power and High Efficiency

Dongkyo Kim, Sanggeun Jeon

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    17 Citations (Scopus)

    Abstract

    This article presents W- and G-band voltage-controlled oscillators (VCOs) fabricated in a 60 nm GaN high electron-mobility transistor (HEMT) process with $f_{T}/f_{\mathrm {MAX}}$ of 190/250 GHz. Two W-band fundamental VCOs (VCO1 and VCO2) are designed without and with a varactor, respectively. In addition, a G-band push-push VCO (VCO3) is designed to demonstrate feasibility of a GaN power source in the sub-terahertz band. The measurement shows that VCO1 and VCO2 exhibit output power of 22.5 and 22.6 dBm and dc-to-RF efficiency of 14.7% and 16.8% at 87.5 and 86.5 GHz, respectively. The power and efficiency are the highest values among the previously reported GaN VCOs operating beyond 50 GHz. Furthermore, VCO2 achieves a wide tuning range of 9.0 GHz (77.5-86.5 GHz). The VCO3 exhibits high output power of 9.3 dBm at 180.6 GHz. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first demonstration of a G-band VCO in a GaN technology. The W- and G-band VCOs occupy compact chip areas of 0.48 and 0.32 mm2, respectively.

    Original languageEnglish
    Article number9478059
    Pages (from-to)3908-3916
    Number of pages9
    JournalIEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques
    Volume69
    Issue number8
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 2021 Aug

    Bibliographical note

    Funding Information:
    Manuscript received January 27, 2021; revised March 24, 2021 and May 3, 2021; accepted May 13, 2021. Date of publication July 8, 2021; date of current version August 5, 2021. This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korea Government (MSIT) under Grant 2021R1A2C2009528. (Corresponding author: Sanggeun Jeon.) Dongkyo Kim was with the School of Electrical Engineering, Korea University, Seoul 02841, South Korea. He is now with Samsung Electronics, Suwon 16677, South Korea.

    Publisher Copyright:
    © 1963-2012 IEEE.

    Keywords

    • G-band
    • W-band
    • gallium nitride (GaN)
    • high efficiency
    • high power
    • microwave monolithic integrated circuits
    • voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO)

    ASJC Scopus subject areas

    • Radiation
    • Condensed Matter Physics
    • Electrical and Electronic Engineering

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