Panasonic Develops High Gain and Low Noise Gallium Nitride
Panasonic today announced the development of Gallium Nitride integrated circuits for the receiver in future millimeter-wave communication systems. The developed amplifier IC achieved the gain of 22dB at 26GHz which is the world highest value in GaN-based ICs at such high frequencies.The GaN IC features integrated microstrip lines which enable very compact 3-stage amplifier on a single chip. This is accomplished by developing a via-hole through chemically stable sapphire formed by a novel laser drilling technique using a high power pulsed laser. The integrated via-holes ensure good ground contacts resulting in reducing the transmission loss on the cost effective sapphire substrate. In addition, Panasonic’s proprietary metal-insulator- semiconductor (MIS) transistor with crystalline SiN film as the gate insulator achieves low noise figure of 1.4dB.
