GaN Stacked Cells for Power Applications in K-Band: A Comparative Study

This work discusses the design and the expected results of two stacked-cells implemented in a 0.15 μm gate-length Gallium Nitride (GaN) Monolithic Microwave Integrated Circuit (MMIC) technology for K-band power applications. Both cells are based on the same overall active periphery but one exploits a self-bias (SeB) approach for the common gate device, whereas the other is biased on a more traditional independent bias routing (SaB). Moreover, with respect to the traditional approach, in both cells the common source device is split in two in order to reduce the parasitic contribution and also to obtain a more compact and easy to implement overall stacked cell. The main goal of this paper is to provide a fair comparison between SeB and SaB stacked cells, by highlighting pros and cons of both approaches in terms of linear and nonlinear performances.